Design and control of a mobile hyper-redundant urban search and rescue robot

In this work we introduce a new concept of a search and rescue robotic system that is composed of a hyper-redundant robot (HRR) which is mounted on a mobile base. This system is capable not only of inspecting areas reachable by the mobile base, but also of inspecting unreachable areas such as small cracks and pipes, using the camera and sensors mounted on its end-effector. The HRR is composed of 14 actuated, serially chained, d.o.f. which have been designed for compactness, yet each is strong enough to support the entire robot structure. The low-level control system of the robot incorporates 14 embedded mini-circuit boards implementing a low number of wires and highspeed, I2C data bus technology. The high-level control algorithms implement kinematic methods to perform on-line motion control both in a global coordinate frame and in the camera coordinate frame for which a camera is mounted on the robot end-effector. The user interface allows the user full and easy control and interpretation of the data received from the camera. All the components of the system are hose-able as required by search and rescue regulations. Finally, we describe the integration of all the above-mentioned components in a complete operational mobile hyper-redundant search and rescue robotic system. This system has been deployed and tested in several search and rescue training scenarios.