An immuno robotic system for humanitarian search and rescue (application stream)

Abstract

The unprecedented number and scales of natural and human-induced disasters in the past decade has urged the emergency search and rescue community around the world to seek for newer, more effective equipment to enhance their efficiency. Tele-operated robotic search and rescue systems consist of tethered mobile robots that can navigate deep into rubbles to search for victims and to transfer critical on-site data for rescuers to evaluate at a safe spot outside of the disaster affected area has gained the interest of many emergency response institutions. To fully realize the promising characteristics of robotics search and rescue systems, however, mobile robots must first be free from their tether and be granted the ability to navigate autonomously even when wireless control commands from the operator cannot reach them. For search and rescue robots to go autonomous in exceedingly unstructured environment, the control system must be highly adaptive and robust to handle all exceptional situations. This paper introduces the control of a low-cost robotic search and rescue system based on an immuno control framework, GSCF, which was developed under the inspiration of the suppression mechanism of the immune discrimination theory. The robotic system can navigate autonomously into rubbles and to search for living human body heat using its thermal array sensor. Design and development of the physical prototype and the control system are described in this paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.