Ground Robots for Disaster Response: A Review

Abstract

Because of human activity, the number of disasters in the world is rising daily. and other environmental factors. A total of 327 disaster events were recorded in 2016 out of these 136 were man-made and 191 were natural disasters, the former accounted for $8 billion in losses and the latter$46 billion. As of July 2020, the number of natural disasters has gone up to 207 and 118 man-made disasters. These numbers are proof that there is a need to find better ways to combat disaster incidents, the limitations to the extent of rescue tasks that can be performed by humans calls for the use of robotic technologies in this field. While several robots such as The BigDog, Thermite 3.0 and Parosha Cheetah GOSAFER are being used presently, there is still some uncertainty about completely relying on them. Furthermore, the paper talks about issues faced while using these robots and how advancements in newer robots such as the Centauro Robot, RoboSimian, Octopus Robot and ATLAS Robot have helped overcome these problems, making use of robots and robotic technologies more effective and efficient and in turn integrating robots with disaster response tasks even better. Based on the mechanism and methods used for their functioning and operation, the mentioned robots have been discussed.