Development of experimental legged robot for inspection and disaster response in plants

Abstract

In this paper, a new experimental legged robot for inspection and disaster response in social infrastructures designed for humans, such as factories and power plants is presented. The robot has distinctive features to climb up and down ladders with a narrow cage, to pass through narrow environments, to move upon scattered debris at disaster sites and to deal with sudden and unexpected contact. The robot also satisfies environmental requirements related to dust, water, and temperature. To implement environmental resistance to a slim body for movement in a narrow environment, cooling of heat sources such as CPUs is a serious problem. Therefore a new cooling structure for humanoid robots is proposed. The proposed robot experiments on the above features are also shown in this paper.