A-B Autonomy of a Shape-shifting Robot 'AMOEBA-I' for USAR

Abstract

The frequent nature disasters and man-made catastrophes during the last decades such as earthquake, typhoon, hurricane, radiation and terrorist attack have greatly aroused people’s attention on the importance of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). In some extremely dangerous catastrophes, the rescue staffs are eager to know the inner situation while they cannot perform an in-depth reconnaissance. Robots are emergently needed for tactical search and rescue, which covers how the field teams actually find, support, and extract survivors. AMOEBA-I, a three-module shape-shifting robot with nine configurations from Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has been developed for such cases. In this research we mainly focused on the A-B autonomy of AMOEBA-I. With global considerations of the shape-shifting robot and its locomotion environments, this chapter presented a multi-sensor-based autonomous control system for the robot “AMOEBA-I” to move outdoors. With the advantages of various configurations, AMOEBA-I has high flexibility under unstructured environments. When AMOEBA-I moves\nin autonomous mode, it can use its sensors to know about the environment, and then select the optimal configuration to achieve an A-B autonomy mission. Experiments have been mainly executed to validate the effectiveness of the system. Since the urban search and rescue environments are usually unstructured and unpredictable, we believe that the shape changing should be an ideal solution to improve the rescue robot's mobility, flexibility, and adaptability. This research result provides a fundamental approach for robot's possible operation in more complex environments.