Design features and characteristics of a rescue robot

This paper presents a design and implementation of a rescue robot. It has two front arms with track mechanism and tracks link between front and rear wheels. With the double track robot system, it is good for unstructured landscape and able to climb over the pile of collapse. This robot is equipped with a lot of sensors such as IR temperature sensors, distance sensors, odometer sensors, pitch/roll, compass sensor, three pan/tilt CCD cameras and voice sensor. For simple and practical concepts, hardware design is divided into control/locomotion subsystem and monitoring subsystem. The RC airplane remote control and receiver are modified to use in control/locomotion subsystem. In monitoring subsystem, three 8 bit CPUs are used for sensor information managing and sending it to serial port of a computer wirelessly. The operator station not only shows all sensors information but also plots the route of victim access and locates victim positions based on simple triangular calculation technique. Furthermore, for looking over obstacles to find the victims from the top view, a pan/tilt camera is placed at the top of the mast which can stretch to 125 cm. height. Audio signal from voice sensor is filtered for selecting only wanted frequencies by the parametric equalizer. This rescue robot design was implemented and worked excellent in the competition, especially it can climb up the stairs with 15 cm. high steps to find the victims on the second floor.