Embedded control system design for coal mine detect and rescue robot

The coal mine detect and rescue robot is used for detecting the explosion environment of coal mine and rescuing miners who are trapped in the underground coal mine after gas explosion. Coal mine is a dangerous place in which many fatal factors menace miners´ life, especially when blasts occurred. Rescue crews usually don´t know the actual situation of the mine tunnel under such circumstances. Therefore it can be very dangerous for rescuers to go into mine tunnels to search survivors without detecting environmental information beforehand. To solve this problem, the coal mine detect and rescue robot has been developed for assisting people to do rescue work. In this paper, the implementation of embedded control system based on the ARM9 microprocessor S3C2410 for our coal mine detect and rescue robot is presented. Based on the design of robot´s hardware, Linux operating system is ported as the platform of the software development. The embedded control system can achieve many tasks of the robot, such as motion control, environmental information acquisition, communication with the remote control system and executing complex control algorithms.