Design of four-arm four-crawler disaster response robot OCTOPUS

Abstract

We developed a four-arm four-crawler advanced disaster response robot called OCTOPUS. Disaster response robots are expected to be capable of both mobility, e.g., entering narrow spaces over very rough unstable ground, and workability, e.g., conducting complex debris-demolition work. However, conventional disaster response robots are specialized in either mobility or workability. Moreover, strategies to independently enhance the capability of crawlers for mobility and arms for workability will increase the robot size and weight. To balance environmental applicability with the mobility and workability, OCTOPUS is equipped with a mutual complementary strategy between its arms and crawlers. The four arms conduct complex tasks while ensuring stabilization when climbing steps. The four crawlers translate rough terrain while avoiding toppling over when conducting demolition work. OCTOPUS is hydraulic driven and teleoperated by two operators. To evaluate the performance of OCTOPUS, we conducted preliminary experiments involving climbing high steps and removing attached objects by using the four arms. The results showed that OCTOPUS completed the two tasks by adequately coordinating its four arms and four crawlers and improvement in operability needs.

Compound locomotion control system combining crawling and walking for multi-crawler multi-arm robot to adapt unstructured and unknown terrain

“…In this section, we describe the implementation of the proposed system and evaluation using a virtual reality (VR) simulator [8]. VR simulator can obtain large number of useful parameters.…”

“…3, OCTOPUS can climb the step which height is lower than 250 mm (the length of flippers) without using arms. Thus, we set the height of those steps are 400 mm [8], which is more than twice as steps in residential areas. Two locomotion modes (CCM and CLM) were used to get over one-terrace step, and CLM mode also be used to execute the other two tasks introduced above.…”

“…Most of DRRs just specialize in one of them, but both of them are important in disaster response tasks. In order to improve performance of DRRs as well as enable them to be deployed to more complex disaster sites, we have developed hydraulic-driven OCTOPUS (h-OCTO-PUS), which has multi-DOF (degrees of freedom) four arms mounted on four sub-crawler robot [8,9]. We then developed electrically-driven OCTOPUS (e-OCTOPUS) for especially indoor applications, as shown in Fig.…”