Development of Crawler type Rescue Robot with Slide Mechanism

In this paper, we develop a rescue robot that searches for the victim in the disaster scene. To go in to a narrow space in such a scene, size of the robot should be small. But the ability to pass over the trench and the rubble is important. We propose the crawler type robot which has the expandable side crawler. This mechanism can enlarge mobility of the robot by expanding the side crawler when it is necessary. And this rescue robot pass the rubble by using the side crawler as the arm. So that the swing mechanism for the side crawler is also installed. Details of the developed robot and several experiments are denoted in this paper.