Hardware Design and Tests of Two-Wheeled Robot Platform for Searching Survivors in Debris Cones

Abstract

Response and recovery are critical soon after or during a large-scale disaster such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, strong winds, explosions, structure failures, and so on. In the project called CURSOR, we have been developing a search and rescue kit to grasp the situation and find trapped victims efficiently under the debris while securing the safety of the first responders. In this paper, hardware design and tests of a small two-wheeled robot platform SMURF are shown. SMURF aims to search for victims under the rubble efficiently by large-scale deployment using transport drones. While descending the rubble pile, they search for victims using cameras and gas sensors. To evaluate the performance and verify the effectiveness of the mobility system in actual conditions, ruggedization tests, mobility tests, and field tests were conducted. The reliability and mobility performance results show the potential of the developed two-wheeled robots to carry out large-scale disaster responses.