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Rapid information gathering during the initial stage of investigation is an important process in case of disasters. However this task could be very risky for human rescue crews, when the infrastructure of the building has been compromised or the environment contaminated by nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. To be able to develop robots that can go inside the site instead of humans, several...
This paper proposes a light-weight sensor platform that consists of gyro-assisted odometry and a 3D laser scanner for localization of human-scale robots. The gyro-assisted odometry provides highly accurate positioning only by dead-reckoning. The 3D laser scanner has a wide field of view and uniform measuring-point distribution. Robust and computationally inexpensive localization is implemented on...
The goal of rescue robotics is to extend the capabilities and to increase the safety of human rescue teams. During a rescue mission a mobile robot is deployed on a rescue site and is operated from a safe place by a human operator. The operator can not see the robot and the environment and a decision on the path selection is very complicated. Our goal is to provide a kind of automatic “pilot system”...
Audio-visual (AV) integration is one of the key ideas to improve perception in noisy real-world environments. This paper describes automatic speech recognition (ASR) to improve human-robot interaction based on AV integration. We developed AV-integrated ASR, which has two AV integration layers, that is, voice activity detection (VAD) and ASR. However, the system has three difficulties: 1) VAD and ASR...
Mobile rescue robots used in search and rescue missions must be able to navigate in unknown environments and map these environments. In such situations, three-dimensional (3D) data obtained by a laser range finder is very useful for supporting teleoperation of robots to locate victims and aid rescue crews in devising rescue strategies. However, when using conventional scanning systems to obtain such...
Mobile robots may be able to aid rescue crews in dangerous environments during search and rescue missions after natural or man-made disasters. In 2006, we began a research project to realize mobile robots that can gather information rapidly at the first stage of a disaster. 3D mapping, which can be an important aid for rescue crews in strategizing rescue missions, is one of our important objectives...
The authors attempted to create a 3-D map of an underground mall and subway station using a tracked vehicle. This paper is a field report of the 3-D mapping of the Sendai subway station by the tracked vehicle in Dec. 2007. From the ticket barriers to the platform, the Sendai subway station consists of three floors. For the 3-D mapping, we developed a tracked vehicle named ??Kenaf??, a small and light-weight...
Rollover avoidance for tracked vehicles with sub-tracks is a difficult, but necessary task. In this study, rollover avoidance, specifically in the direction of the roll, is performed using a normalized energy stability margin which requires the estimation of a robot's tumble axis. However, a precise estimation of the tumble axis is very difficult because it requires accurate distributed contact information...
We are developing robots for inspection of the under floor of houses. The developed robot system is reported in this paper. The mobile robot platform is based on a crawer type robot developed for rescue purposes. As sensors, a pan-tilt-zoom camera, top-view camera and SOKUIKI sensor are used. We constructed a test field and verified the performance of the robot.
Active flippers for tracked vehicles are very useful to improve traversability on uneven terrain. However it is widely known that control of flippers also increases the work-load for operators, particularly where the vehicle and the operator are far apart. To reduce the work-load, we aim to realize a sensor-based autonomous controller of flippers to enable a dasiasemi-autonomous operationpsila of...
Active flippers for tracked vehicles are very useful to improve traversability on uneven terrain. However it is widely known that control of flippers also increases the work-load for operators, particularly where the vehicle and the operator are far apart. To reduce the work-load, we aim to realize a sensor-based autonomous controller of flippers to enable a ldquosemi-autonomous operationrdquo of...
A rescue crawler robot with flipper arms has high ability to get over rough terrain, but it is hard to control its flipper arms in remote control. The authors aim at development of a semi-autonomous control system for the solution. In this paper, the authors propose a sensor reflexive method that controls these flippers autonomously for getting over unknown steps. Our proposed method is effective...
A rescue crawler robot having flipper arm has high ability to get over rough terrain, but it is hard to control its flippers in remote control. The authors aim at development of a semi-autonomous control system for the crawler robot. In the system, moving direction is specified by an operator at remote place. Joypad (Sony PS2 controller) is used as input devise. For increasing its stability and robustness...
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