Development of carbon dioxide sensing system for searching victims in large scale disasters

Japan is a natural disasters prone country. In the Hanshin Awaji great earthquake in 1995, over 6000 people were killed. If appropriate rescue activities had been performed, the probability of survival would have been fairly high. From such experience, various proposal and development of rescue apparatus are being researched now. In our project, we develop small searching machine called UMRS (utility vehicle for search) and a system aiming at "discovery of the sufferers". UMRS robot, with many sensors, go into a collapsed house and perform searching for victims. We aim at early detection of the sufferers by arranging a lot of UMRS groups in the calamity spot and one or a small number of manipulator controls them. UMRS-V has a lot of sensor but in this paper, we tested and developed UMRS-V robots using carbon dioxide sensor (TGS4161) to search for victims. We have done experiment with the TGS4161 sensor, found out its characteristics. Experiment has shown that TGS4161 sensor can be applied in rescue robot and it can give us good information to search for victims. From that we proposed method for searching victims in debris with better strategy.