Introduction
Every day, we see bitter an unpredictable incidents such as earthquakes, fires etc. happen all over the world. For years casualties and financial losses due to these incidents have bugged man's mind and he has been trying to decrease the amount of their damage. However, the large extent of the incidence area and the speediness of changes in this area renders a man incapable of offering a solution to save people's lives and reduce this damage. For example some time ago in Iran, one of the oldest buildings in Tehran, the Plasco building which is one of the most famous shopping centers of various clothing goods, collapsed because of a fire and 30 firefighters got stuck under its debris. According to the statements of authorities in the place of the incident, debris removal in Plasco is harder than relieving an earthquake with a magnitude of 6 ML; because debris removal is accompanied with fire, smoke and oxygen deficit. The thick white smoke that was rising from underneath the Plasco debris, posed a problem to the debris removal operation and each piece of debris that was removed, the fire blazed once more and firefighters attempted to put it out. This example highlights the importance of robots and the incapability of brute human force when facing similar incidents. In this incident, the authorities and relievers were dealing with challenges such as thick smoke and dormant fires during debris removal, identification and extracting of the injured from the building, electricity outage, tunneling, welding, drilling, etc., which delayed relief process a lot and the people stuck beneath the debris were coming closer and closer to death with every second. This term of competitions aims to bring robots' challenges closer to reality. Every year the competition aims to hold relevant challenges, in two parts: Manual and Autonomous. The first term of these competitions is dedicated to robot welding and therefore is called FIRA Welding Challenge.
In this challenge, different environments of a simulated city and its suburbs are considered for the robots to weld using different welding methodologies, performing the items required in the rules. In virtue of the remarks above, we hope to make a huge progress in this field and be able to optimally use these kinds of robots in real environments.
