Abstract
Rescue robots are expected to carry out reconnaissance and dexterity operations in unknown environments comprising unstructured obstacles. Although a wide variety of designs and implementations have been presented within the field of rescue robotics, embedding all mobility, dexterity, and reconnaissance capabilities in a single robot remains a challenging problem. This paper explains the design and implementation of Karo, a mobile robot that exhibits a high degree of mobility at the side of maintaining required dexterity and exploration capabilities for urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. We first elicit the system requirements of a standard rescue robot from the frameworks of Rescue Robot League (RRL) of RoboCup and then, propose the conceptual design of Karo by drafting a locomotion and manipulation system. Considering that, this work presents comprehensive design processes along with detail mechanical design of the robot’s platform and its 7-DOF manipulator. Further, we present the design and implementation of the command and control system by discussing the robot’s power system, sensors, and hardware systems. In conjunction with this, we elucidate the way that Karo’s software system and human–robot interface are implemented and employed. Furthermore, we undertake extensive evaluations of Karo’s field performance to investigate whether the principal objective of this work has been satisfied. We demonstrate that Karo has effectively accomplished assigned standardized rescue operations by evaluating all aspects of its capabilities in both RRL’s test suites and training suites of a fire department. Finally, the comprehensiveness of Karo’s capabilities has been verified by drawing quantitative comparisons between Karo’s performance and other leading robots participating in RRL.
Highlights
Natural and manmade disasters have caused heavy casualties and significant economic damages over the past few decades
These configurations are inspired by National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) standard test methods, and we here employ a holistic combination of their standards when designing our system architecture, (2) we evaluate various conceptual hardware designs for locomotion and manipulation that were tested in our previous works, and point out properties of each design
We develop an optimal conceptual design by incorporating the strengths of the previous versions, which maximizes the functionality of the robot in field performances, (3) we propose a simplified and effective approach for design and analysis of the teleoperated system that leverages customized designs to meet the standardized requirements of response robots in one system, and (4) We empirically show that our approach in the design and implementation of Karo, led to a mobile robot which exhibits a high degree of mobility at the side of maintaining required dexterity and exploration capabilities for urban search and rescue (USAR) missions
Summary
Natural and manmade disasters have caused heavy casualties and significant economic damages over the past few decades. As the impacts of catastrophes are increasing, the necessity of rescue robotics, which explores solutions to minimize the casualties for all phases of a disaster, has increased as well [1]. Due to peerless capabilities of rescue robots compared to human and canine. The very first academic attempts in the field of rescue robotics have been done by two groups at Kobe University in Japan [6] and the Colorado School of Mines in the United States motivated by Kobe earthquake and the bombing of Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City respectively. The mobile platforms introduced in [7] and [8] can be known as two early experimental efforts in design and implementation of mobile robot platforms which were potentially suited for USAR, though the authors did not explicitly mention their USAR applications. Rescue robotics started getting more attentions gradually among the mobile robotics research community [9], which led to developing rescue robots with a variety of locomotion mechanisms such as spherical [10, 11], legged [12], wheeled [13], and tracked [14] locomotion
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