NICER - Networked Infrastructureless Cooperation for Emergency Response

NICER was a joint project aimed at investigating how information and communication technology can be established quickly to connect people in order to enable cooperation in an catastrophic disaster scenario. Three research topics were addressed: (1) establishing autonomous, decentralized, and robust communication groups, (2) creating communication bridges between these groups, and (3) enabling the cooperation with services and applications using the communication network. Our part in the project was to investigate a shared world model (i.e. knowledge base) to support cooperation in dynamic distributed teams composed of humans and robots.

The project was founded by the LOEWE program (Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz) of the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts. NICER was active from 01/01/2015 to 31/12/2018. It was a collaborative research project involving nine research groups from TU Darmstadt, one research group from Philipps-Universität Marburg and the group Distributed Systems from Universität Kassel. A continuation of the research on a much wider subject area and organisational scope is planned.