An information collecting robot for non-professional operator - development of the vision support system using thermography

Recently, various robots have been developed and they are applied to various tasks. A remote controlled robot for collecting information in disasters, which are earthquakes and so on, is one of most effective application. For this reason, various rescue robots have been developed. However, previous rescue systems that use robots have significant problem. That is shortage of operators. In our previous works, to solve the problem we focused on volunteer staffs, and proposed a concept of rescue system in which professional rescue staffs and volunteer staffs work together for handling of catastrophic disaster, and developed a prototype of rescue robot for non-professional operator. However, the prototype system was too simple to apply it to real disaster, and to develop an actual use model, enhancement of each function of the prototype system was necessary. An autonomous detection system of survivors using thermography is one of the functions of the prototype system. In this paper, we obtain various thermal image of human body by experiments, and enhance the detection system of survivors using thermography by the analysis of the obtained thermal images.