Semi-autonomous control system of rescue crawler robot having flippers for getting Over unknown-Steps

A rescue crawler robot with flipper arms has high ability to get over rough terrain, but it is hard to control its flipper arms in remote control. The authors aim at development of a semi-autonomous control system for the solution. In this paper, the authors propose a sensor reflexive method that controls these flippers autonomously for getting over unknown steps. Our proposed method is effective in unknown and changeable environment. The authors applied the proposed method to Aladdin, and examined validity of these control rules in unknown environment.