Intelligent Robot-assisted Humanitarian Search and Rescue System

The unprecedented scale and number of natural and man-made disasters in the past decade has urgedinternational emergency search and rescue communities to seek for novel technology to enhance operationefficiency. Tele-operated search and rescue robots that can navigate deep into rubble to search for victims and totransfer critical field data back to the control console has gained much interest among emergency responseinstitutions. In response to this need, a low-cost autonomous mini robot equipped with thermal sensor, accelerometer, sonar, pin-hole camera, microphone, ultra-bright LED and wireless communication module isdeveloped to study the control of a group of decentralized mini search and rescue robots. The robot can navigateautonomously between voids to look for living body heat and can send back audio and video information to allowthe operator to determine if the found object is a living human. This paper introduces the design and control of alow-cost robotic search and rescue system based on an immuno control framework developed for controllingdecentralized systems. Design and development of the physical prototype and the immunity-based control systemare described in this paper