A Novel Modular Mobile Robot Prototype for Urban Search and Rescue

The last few years have witnessed an increasing interest in reconfigurable mobile robotic technologies (Yim, M.; et al., 2000). The applications include the following areas: industrial inspection (Granosik, G.; Hansen, M. G.; Borenstein, J. 2005), conducting surveillance, urban search and rescue, military reconnaissance and space exploration (Yim, M.; et al., 2003). Reconfigurable robots consist of several modules which are able to change the way they are connected. The modular approach enables mobile robots to reconfigure, which is essential for tasks that are difficult for a fixed-shape robot (Kamimura, A.; et al.; 2001). During movement the robot confronts an unstructured environment and handles the uncertainties by reconfiguring its structure (Castano, A.; et al., 2000). The basic requirement for this kind of robotic system moving on rough terrains is extraordinary motion capabilities. The emphasis for discussion of this chapter is on the field of urban search and rescue (Miller, P.G. 2002) (Takayama, T.; Hirose, S. 2000). The history of human development has always been a struggle with natural disasters such as earthquakes, storms and floods. Recently the number of disasters by accidents or terrorism has evidently been increasing too (Casper, J.; 2002). Urban search and rescue is a domain that involves a great amount of manpower; and it is quite dangerous and laborious in a hostile environment (Matsuno, F.; Tadokoro, S. 2004). The development of mobile robots offers an intelligent alternative solution to the above-mentioned problems. The application of the robotic system can relieve people of this challenging work and provide an opportunity for robots to play a pivotal support role, realize automatic manipulation in a complex environment and improve the level of civil and military technology. In this chapter, a novel modular reconfigurable mobile robot named JL-I is presented, which to date consists of three identical modules. After a short survey, the basic functions of a reconfigurable mobile robot are summarized systematically based on research into work targets. JL-I features active joints formed by serial and parallel mechanisms which endow the robot with the ability of changing shapes in three dimensions. With the docking mechanisms, the modules can connect or disconnect flexibly and automatically. After that the discussion focuses on the various locomotion capabilities, such as crossing high vertical