Development of a Tele-Operated Rescue Robot for a Disaster Response

This paper proposes practical hardware design strategies and control methods for a rescue robot to save patients in disastrous environments. None of the existing humanoid robots have not shown the capability to efficiently execute rescue tasks for transferring a human to a safe place in a highly unstructured world. To resolve this problem a new form of powerful dual arm mechanism and hybrid tracked-legged mobile platform is developed and the motion is synthesized with dynamics based optimization and a modified hierarchical control scheme. These new design and control policies enable us to simultaneously enhance the manipulation performance and driving stability which have been verified through both in extensive numerical simulations and physical experiments where the rescue robot and whole-body control are indeed required.