Development of a transformational mobile robot to search victims under debris and rubbles

Mobile robots are expected to support relief activities, after a great scale disaster. These robots need ability to move on/in rubble in order to gather information related to victims and conditions. However, there is no mobile robot which has enough movement ability. Mobile robots need big bodies in order to traverse on unstructured terrain composed of big rubbles, but they need small bodies in order to enter in narrow space. In this paper, we proposed novel concept of a transformational mobile robot in order to solve this inconsistency, and manufactured the proposed mechanism and evaluated its fundamental movement ability.