Development of "Souryu-III": connected crawler vehicle for inspection inside narrow and winding spaces

We have developed Souryu-I and II, connected crawler vehicles that travel in the rubble. They were developed for the purpose of finding survivors trapped in collapsed buildings. We have identified problems of these machines through experiments and studies, which are shape of the crawler, joint mechanism, dust- and waterproofing and communication system. We developed an improved model called Souryu-III based on these findings. It has unitized crawlers, new joint mechanism, dust proofing and waterproofing mechanism and tethered communication system with a new reel mechanism in order to address those problems. This paper describes Souryu-III, its mechanism and the experiments to test its mobile performance.