Disaster Rescue via Multi-Robot Collaboration: Development, Control, and Deployment

Abstract

Aging social infrastructure needs maintenance and inspection for which robot technology is highly effective. It is also effective for disaster rescue and recovery operations. Tunnel disaster rescue is risky for human workers. Robot technology can perform this work easily and accelerate rescue and recovery operations. This paper introduces a framework for the rescue robot development, control, and deployment steps. This framework also proposes automated and hybrid robot control systems in addition to conventional manual control. A multi-robot collaboration system causes the proposed control system to be convenient for deployment, reliable, and accelerate rescue work. In the development phase, controllers and different additional assistance tools for the robot have been developed in addition to the basic robot. As the proposed framework has been cultivated through our development and team collaboration training for the World Robot Summit (WRS) and the actual competition of the WRS, we will also present what we have achieved at the WRS.