Plasma-RX: Autonomous Rescue robots

Abstract

Plasma-RX is a team of robots for search and rescue mission in an urban environment. The robot configuration contains differential drive tracks with front/rear flippers and serial-link arms equipped with cameras. They contain many sensors: thermopile array, CO2 sensor, microphone, tilt sensor, digital compass and laser range finder. For low level control of robots, a processor Arm7 and a special-purpose controller implemented with FPGA are used. An onboard computer performs high level processing such as navigation and victim identification. The navigation algorithm consisted of SLAM for localize and mapping, SIFT for hazmat tag identification. Plasma-RX system can be operated in tele-operated and autonomous mode. Recently, the team has participated in Rescue robot league at World RoboCup 2008, Suzhou, China, and won the first prize and the best-in-class in mobility award.