A novel, miniature robot designed to use its two arms for both manipulation and locomotion is described. Intended for military and civilian surveillance and search-and-rescue applications, the robot must be small, rugged, and lightweight, hence the desire for dual-use. The robot consists of two, three-degree-of-freedom arms that can stow completely inside the 75 mm diameter cylindrical body for...

Staged at Piombino, Italy in September 2015, euRathlon 2015 was the world’s first multi-domain (air, land and sea) multi-robot search and rescue competition. In a mock-disaster scenario inspired by the 2011 Fukushima NPP accident, the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge required teams of robots to cooperate to map the area, find missing workers and stem a leak. In this paper we outline the euRathlon...

Using this technique, a robot can operate in an environment without a priori knowledge of a map and its location in the world. This is a critical skill that can be utilized in a wide range of applications that require a robot to be able to explore a region and return to its starting location, learn different paths to key locations in a world, and to traverse a region completely. Such applicatio...

In this research proposal we discuss the use of salamander-like robot for search and rescue applications. We present three papers which are relevant to our topic. The first paper [1] discusses robot versatility and gives an overview and comparison of well known robots. The second paper [2] presents an obstacle aided locomotion strategy for a snake robot. The third paper [3] presents an intuitiv...

Coordinating a group of robots to work in formation has been suggested for a number of tasks, such as urban searchand-rescue, traffic control, and harvesting solar energy. Algorithms for controlling robot formations have been inspired by biological and organizational systems. In our approach to robot formation control, each robot is treated like a cell in a cellular automaton, where local inter...

In urban search and rescue (USAR) situations resources are limited and workload is high. Robots that act as team players instead of tools could help in these situations. A Virtual Reality (VR) experiment was set up to test if team performance of a human-robot team increases when the robot act as such a team player. Three robot settings were tested ranging from the robot as a tool to the robot a...