Development of the Quadruped Walking Robot for Humanitarian Demining (Proposal of the System and Basic Experiment of Several Foot-end-effectors)

Abstract

This paper proposes a quadruped-walking robot which performs mine detection and removal tasks. Because there are many antipersonnel mines remaining from wars, it is desirable to provide a safe, inexpensive tool which civilians can use to remove these mines The robot has a tool changing system on its back, so by utilizing the legs as manipulation arms and connecting various tools to the feet, it can perform mine detection and removal tasks. We devised several conceptualized tasks for mine detection and removal using a robot system. For these tasks, we developed three kinds of end effectors to attach a walking robot system with the shape-feedback master-slave arm as a kind of basic technology. We discuss the basic design concepts of the robot system and develop it by way of trial experiment.