Autonomous disaster navigation · no human entry required
Every year, people die trapped in burning buildings because structural collapse makes entry too dangerous for first responders. DEBRIS is a reinforcement learning agent trained to navigate smoke-filled, collapsing environments using only spatial sensors — no cameras, no visibility required. Deployable on a ground robot or drone, it finds the path to safety and guides survivors out.
How it works
A firefighter entering a burning building relies on vision, radio contact, and years of training. DEBRIS relies on physics. Its 71-dimensional sensor array — proximity sensors, velocity, spatial memory — mirrors what a person feels through vibration, touch, and spatial awareness when visibility is zero. The policy was trained entirely from physics reward signals with no human demonstrations.
71-dimensional sensor-only observation. Works in zero visibility, smoke, and total darkness. The same sensory modality available to a search-and-rescue robot equipped with proximity and inertial sensors — and nothing else.
Four-stage curriculum: open corridor → falling debris → scatter shrapnel → full chaos with simultaneous ceiling crumble, fire zones, and wall collapse. Policy trained on A100 GPU via Modal, 4.3M steps with no human demonstrations.
The agent finds the path. A survivor follows audio or haptic cues from the robot. Firefighters coordinate from outside. No human enters the danger zone. The robot is expendable. People are not.
Eval · debris_and_scatter stage · 10 seeds
Technical details
| Stage | Debris | Scatter | Crumble | Steps | Reward |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| static_only | 0 | 0 | — | 600k | +8.5 |
| debris_only | 3 | 0 | — | 1.0M | −2.8 |
| debris_and_scatter | 5 | 3 | — | 1.2M | +0.17 |
| full_chaos | 5 | 5 | ✓ | 1.5M | −10.9 |
| Indices | Name | Dim | Encodes |
|---|---|---|---|
| [0:3] | agent_pos | 3 | xyz world frame |
| [3:9] | vel + facing | 6 | velocity + forward vector |
| [9:12] | goal_rel_pos | 3 | goal − agent |
| [12:47] | debris pos+vz | 35 | 10 bodies × xyz + fall speed |
| [47:62] | lateral vel | 15 | vx vy of primary debris |
| [62:70] | flags | 8 | time · heading · ceil · fire |
| [70] | collision | 1 | contact force threshold |