Research on rescue robots with force sensors on the fingertips for rubble withdrawal works

Abstract

This research is concerned with a rubble withdrawal method using force sensors attached on fingertips in order to not break down rubbles during operating for advanced autonomous rescue robots. In rescue fields, mass, shapes, materials and so on of rubbles are unknown. Thus, it is necessary to recognize or estimate a good grasping position without breaking rubbles case by case at the time. Therefore, it is important to detect points on the rubble for that stacked rubble are not broken down by robot !Gs hand during working. We research an algorithm to estimate characteristics of dynamics of the grasping rubble and grasping position by time response of changes of forces which sensed by force sensors attached on robot !Gs fingers and tracking results of changes of posture obtained by camera images. In this research, we aim to build a rescue robot system for deciding a grasping position without breaking unknown rubbles using force sensors and cameras. In this paper, we show relationships between changes of grasping forces, grasping positions and posture of the rubbles for the basic study. It will be considered that characteristics of dynamics and a grasping position of rubble can be estimated depending on grasping forces. Then, a grasping position is estimated by obtained forces and the validity of the estimation method is shown.