Robot ropes for disaster response operations

In disaster relief operations, lives can depend on timely location and safe removal of trapped and often injured people within damaged infrastructure (collapsed buildings, etc.). Further, these operations must be carried out without further collapsing structures within the environment. An emerging class of rope-like continuous backbone “continuum” robots provides new capabilities to address these critical operational problems. Continuum robots, also known as “robot trunks and tentacles”, can bend continuously along their structure, and are highly compliant. These features allow continuum robots to gently penetrate into congested spaces, navigating within complex and a priori unknown obstacle fields. This allows them to safely deploy sensors into collapsed structures, such as within debris in collapsed buildings, to assess conditions and potentially identify survivors. The further ability of these robots to use their bodies to perform whole arm grasping, wrapping safely around environmental objects, offers the possibility of using them as “active ropes” to gently pull victims out of such environments, while avoiding generation of large forces which might further collapse already damaged structures. We have developed a nine degree of freedom pneumatically actuated continuum robot, and deployed it to inspect within rubble piles and to gently grasp and retrieve human surrogates (dummies). Broader application of these kinds of “robot ropes” include remote inspection operations in Space and nuclear environments, as well as a variety of minimally invasive medical procedures.