Humanoids at Work: The WALK-MAN Robot in a Postearthquake Scenario

Abstract

T oday, human intervention is the only effective course of action after a natural or artificial disaster. This is true both for relief operations, where search and rescue of survivors is the priority, and for subsequent activities, such as those devoted to building assessment. In these contexts, the use of robotic systems would be beneficial to drasti cally reduce operators' risk exposure. However, the readiness level of robots still prevents their effective exploitation in relief operations, which are highly critical and characterized by severe time constraints. On the contrary, current robotic technologies can be profitably applied in procedures like building assessment after an earthquake. To date, these operations are carried out by engineers and architects who inspect numerous buildings over a large territory, with a high cost in terms of time and resources, and with a high risk due to aftershocks. The main idea is to have the robot acting as an alter ego of the human operator, who, thanks to a virtual-reality device and a body-tracking system based on inertial sensors, teleoperates the robot. The goal of this article is to discuss the exploitation of the perception and manipulation capabilities of the WALK-MAN robot for building assessment in areas affected by earthquakes. The presented work illustrates the hardware and software characteristics of the developed robotic platform and results obtained with field testing in the real earthquake scenario of Amatrice, Italy. Considerations on the experience and feedback provided by civil engineers and architects engaged in the activities are reported and discussed.

Hands in the Real World

“…Various efforts have sought to develop adaptive and reconfigurable hands for these environments, such as in works by Lovchik and Diftler (1999), Laliberté and Gosselin (2001), and FIGURE 1 | Examples of real world applied hands (Lovchik and Diftler, 1999;Hemming et al, 2014;Controzzi et al, 2016;Galloway et al, 2016;Gardecki and Podpora, 2017;Stuart et al, 2017;Friedl et al, 2018;Negrello et al, 2018). This paper focuses on field exploration, industrial applications, service robots, search and rescue and prosthetics.…”

A Spherical Active Joint for Humanoids and Humans

“…Serial Joint Structures: Serial joints are widely used in humanoid and prosthetic applications. Two examples of wellknown humanoid robots implementing serial structures in their joints are the Walk-Man [2] and Ocean One [3]. Another type of robotic application is the KuKa LWR manipulator [10].…”

“…Looking at robotic applications, although humanoid robots do not necessarily have to replicate exactly the human architecture, there are applications where robots can benefit from an anthropomorphic structure. Two relevant examples are given by those humanoids that have to be used in environments made for humans and by tele-operated contexts, where a human operator maps its body movements into the robot [2], [3]. In the latter case, in particular, a one-to-one joint mapping can simplify the use of the robot and make the teleoperation more intuitive, easy and functional.…”

Deploying the NASA Valkyrie Humanoid for IED Response: An Initial Approach and Evaluation Summary

“…To have sufficient control but not overburden the operator during task execution, supervisory control over complete autonomy or teleoperation is preferred [4]. Concretely, the presented approach has similarities to [5], [6], that are used in search, rescue, and disaster response scenarios [7], [8]. However, other novel tasks specific to IED response are considered, namely crossing a narrow gap, retrieving a suspected IED from a vehicle, depositing the IED in a TCV tray, and operating the TCV.…”