This paper is a valuable contribution to the important and life-saving urban search and rescue (USAR) problem. It takes us a little closer to Hiroaki Kitano’s vision of robots working seamlessly with humans and software agents to save lives in an urban disaster. The authors describe the reusable environment for task-structured intelligent networked agents (RETSINA) multiagent system and its application to real robots. The two-tiered communication hierarchy is particularly interesting. The paper also describes USARsim, a high-fidelity simulation of the standard USAR arenas. The authors’ experiences with designing physical robots and their simulations in parallel are fascinating. I am convinced that this is the right approach for USAR robots, and hope that USARsim becomes almost as popular as the phenomenally successful RoboCup Rescue simulator.