Sidewinder: Snake Robot’s Stereo Vision System for Rescue in Collapsed Debris at Disaster Sites

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present Sidewinder, a unique stereo vision system for snake-shaped robots operating in search and rescue scenarios. The robot should navigate the environment by finding and passing through narrow spaces (i.e., forward vision task) and search for persons in need of rescue (i.e., panoramic vision task). Therefore, we propose two types of image mapping methods to generate respectively input images for stereo visual SLAM and person detection. This work presents preliminary results using Sidewinder's images as input for the ORS-SLAM2 for localization and mapping, and YOLO-v3, for person detection.