Design and Control Strategy for Rescue Robot to Execute Rescue Missions in a Highly Unstructured Environment

Abstract

We propose a new hardware design and control strategy for a rescue robot to enhance its manipulation capability and ensure its driving stability in a highly unstructured environment. The robot is redesigned to efficiently rescue an impaired person lying on the ground and to dispose of a dangerous object. The singularity robust hierarchical inverse kinematics method is used to achieve versatile kinematic and dynamic tasks, where task priority is established among the motion primitives to precisely resolve task confliction. An active force control scheme is implemented in combination with a passive compliance mechanism to successfully execute the rescue mission by regulating the interaction force between the robot’s lower arms and the ground. The effectiveness of the hardware design and control methods has been demonstrated through extensive numerical simulations and experimental tests.