Canine as Robot in Directed Search

Abstract

One of the goals of rescue robotics has inevitably lead to the production of rubble often on a been to allow machines to sense and act where vast scale. Speed, accuracy and safety are critical factors people cannot go. Deployed with various sensors and when searching for survivors in urban area turned to under the guidance of trained operators these rubble. systems have shown great potential for finding victims in rubble. However, the current state of Unfortunately search is a difficult and often mobility of all deployed rescue robots is such that dangerous process. While buildings collapse in they can only be employed in very constrained predictable ways, the orientation, interaction and size of circumstances where surfaces are mostly regular and the rubble piles formed are often unpredictable. Spaces acceptable for various modes of tracked and wheeled or voids appear and disappear as the piles shift and mobility. We have been exploring an alternative settle. As time passes the rubble settles but the employing the existing abilities of trained USAR probability of finding survivors is greatly reduced. canines to search rubble both quickly and effectively.Searching though rubble is time consuming because This paper discusses one ofthe potential areas where footing is often unstable as are the structures that form as canines might be augmented to deliver the desired a result of the initial collapse. There are usually no sensing and remote control ofa robot. obvious paths and the threat of secondary collapse is sometimes a concern and often limits where searchers Kireteywords:ar Canine Augme ntch,USAtionR can go. Coordination of the search effort is made more directed search,'rubble search, USAR. difficult by the rigors of simply moving around on the 1 Introduction pile.

The Augmentation of Urban Search and Rescue Dogs With Sensing, Control, and Actuation--Extending the Metaphor, "Dog as Robot"

“…where their handler cannot follow [22,25,26]. The CAT system has been shown to be successful in imparting the sensed, real-time situation of a dog-through telepresence-to a remote human who can use this information to help plan a rescue.…”

“…The worked done by Ferworn et. all [22][23][24][25] addressed the deficiencies common in Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UVG) in their very limited traversal capacity by utilizing search dogs equipped with telepresence robotics technologies. The work eventually developed the CAT system.…”

“…al. [22,23,29,51,111,112] exploits the Biological Intelligence of search dogs as a kind of metaphor replacement for autonomous robots is central to this work. Dogs are trained or "programmed" to search for live victims and use their own perception to perform the search and automatically traverse rubble.…”

Computational public safety in emergency management communications

“…A complementary area of research is the augmentation of US&R dogs [1,[3][4][5] with technology that allows emergency first responders to experience what is happening around the dog while it is searching. This area of research is very important as it allows searchers to become aware of what is actually happening around the dog without interfering with the search.…”

Wireless Mesh Network Performance for Urban Search and Rescue Missions

“…A complementary area of research is the augmentation of USAR dogs [8][9][10][11] with technology that allows emergency first responders to experience what is happening around the dog while it is searching. While this area of research is very important, the handler still does not know what the dog is actually doing while out of sight; this augmenting of senses focuses on what is around the dog and not the dog itself.…”