Development of a Hybrid Locomotion Robot for Earthquake Search and Rescue in Partially Collapsed Building

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a hybrid locomotion robot for earthquake search and rescue in partially collapsed buildings. The objective of this research is to find a new method to avoid rescuers from accessing partially collapsed buildings, and instead access these buildings using a robot, searching for trapped victims and transporting necessary goods (food, water, communication system and so on) to them. To achieve this goal, we design a robot with several functions which include: (1) hybrid locomotion (flying and moving on flat surfaces), (2) goods transportation mechanism, (3) victim detection sensing system, (4) victims position estimation system. In this paper, the details of the robot and some experimental results are presented.