Founded in 2015 by Prof. Gian Paolo Cimellaro thanks to the economic contribution of the European Research Council and Politecnico di Torino, the laboratory is located at the ground floor of DISEG, entrance 1. It occupies an area of about 50 m2 and is divided into two rooms. The first is equipped with a virtual reality platform, a 92” video-wall, 6 workstations for PhD, Visiting and MSc students. In the second room there are a 2D shaking table of 3.0x1.5 m powered by 4 electric linear actuators, two high performance servers, an electric and a mechanic work desks. A multimedia system allows to use part of the room also as meeting room. The aim of the laboratory is to support research in the field of resilience and emergency management related especially to seismic events and other natural disasters. The shaking table can be used to make dynamic, pseudo-dynamic and hybrid tests in real-time on small scale specimens. Moreover, thank to virtual reality, it is possible to investigate the human behaviour during and after an earthquake. Finally, the laboratory sustains also education with practical classes in order to demonstrate the concepts learnt during theoretical class lectures.

Ideal Rescue – integrated design and control of sustainable communities during emergencies – is developing a novel method to assess the performance of critical infrastructures during emergencies, taking into account human emotions and behaviour. The project is multidisciplinary and challenging as it tries to code the human role into a computer model together with the physical structures of a large-scale city. The long-term goal of Ideal Rescue is to develop a user-friendly tool which mayors and decision makers can use before, during and after emergencies to simulate the effect their decisions have on cities and population.

The Ideal Sensor project - integrated smart device for emergency management – investigates the potential of using wearable sensors during emergencies in order to save more lives. The objective is to test a prototype of wearable sensor (similar to a smartwatch) that in addition to general features (fitness, entertainment, etc.) will be part of an infrastructure to localize people inside or nearby buildings. Moreover, it will be possible to monitor the physical condition of people and the structural state of buildings. The proposed solution can work also without an internet connection and during power outages. It allows to generate maps with the exact position of injured people making the rescue operations more effective.

There are several different experimental techniques that can be used to test the response of structures to verify their seismic performance, one of which is the use of a shaking table. This is a device for shaking structural models or building components with a wide range of simulated ground motions, including reproductions of recorded earthquakes time-histories. Test specimens are fixed to the platform and shaken, often to the point of failure. Shaking tables are used extensively in seismic research, as they provide the means to excite structures in such a way that they are subjected to conditions representative of true earthquake ground motions. On 31st October 2014 took place the visit to the shaking table at the Politecnico di Torino laboratory as part of the congress “La Vulnerabilità delle infrastrutture civili: Analisi e adeguamento sismico con metodi classici e innovative”. The goal was to show the students the shaking table design and produced in the laboratory and to show a shaking table test in order to introduce them to experimental tests and to visualize some phenomena in structures and soils seen in lectures due to earthquake loading. The shaking table is a bidirectional prototype that can replicate an earthquake in its two components.