A-B Autonomy of a Shape-shifting Robot 'AMOEBA-I' for USAR

Abstract

The frequent nature disasters and man-made catastrophes during the last decades such as earthquake, typhoon, hurricane, radiation and terrorist attack have aroused people’s attention on the importance of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). Although people have more watchfulness than before, a large number of people still have died in unprofessional rescue due to inadequate equipment and being lack of professional manpower (Erkmen et al, 2002; Casper and Murphy, 2003). Timely searching for victims and subsequent rescue operations from the rubble of collapsed buildings are highly required. Since these operations are very dangerous for human workers and even for trained dogs, autonomous mobile systems are highly needed to help in finding trapped victims. It is a great challenge to develop search and rescue robot that can actually work in the disaster site. The search and rescue robot research includes not only the robotics technology but also the rescue technology and the disaster science. Researches sponsored by the governments and the companies have resulted in the emergence of various kinds of search and rescue robots. Since earthquake happens in Japan frequently, intelligent rescue systems and robotic technology have been expected to mitigate disaster damages, especially after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. From 2002, “Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas” (a 5 years project which also called DDT project) was launched by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, in Japan. Many kinds of search and rescue robots have been developed (Matsuno and Tadokoro, 2004), such as Souryu (Hirose and Fukushima, 2002), Moira (Osuka and Kitajima, 2003), and KOHGA (Tetsushi et al, 2004). In America the rescue robot research has attracted a lot attention too. Several robots were used for the search and detection operation in the collapsed World Trade Center building in September 2001 (Casper and Murphy, 2003). In the University of South Florida, Professor Murphy and her fellow have developed “Bujold”, a kind of search and rescue robot that has the ability of shape shifting and has been equipped with many sensors (Murphy, 2002). In Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, researchers have developed multi-joint robot for inspection (Wolf et al, 2003). Foster-Miller Company also carries out TALON Robot series for search and rescue mission. In China, a series of search and rescue robots have been developed in recent years (Liu et al, 2007a; Zhang et al, 2006; Zou et al, 25