Research on controls of sub crawlers for climbing up stairs with LRF for rescue robots

Abstract

This paper presents an autonomous control method for rescue robots climbing up stairs using LRF. In disaster areas caused by earthquakes, rescue robots are needed to find injured people from under broken buildings instead of rescue workers. Then, the robots require high skills to be controlled, because the robots are operated by remote controls with wireless cameras. Especially, in case of climbing up stairs to find victims, it is hard to recognize a depth between robots and steps for operators with wireless cameras. Then we have proposed the method to estimate slope angles of stairs using LRF and an angle control method for sub crawlers of rescue robots. Here, we try to develop the estimation system with small and low-cost sensors instead of commercial ranging sensors that are too large to be attached on rescue robots. In this paper, we present the validity of the proposed method for actual stairs in a building. First, we present a method for estimating a slope angle of stairs using LRF. Second, a selection method of measured points for an accurate estimation for the slope angle is considered. Third, it is shown that our constructed rescue robot estimates the angle of the slope and climbs up the actual stairs with controlling postures of the robot with sub crawlers.