Design and Manufacturing of a Mobile Rescue Robot

This paper presents design and manufacturing procedure of a tele-operative rescue robot. First, the general task to be performed by such a robot is defined, and variant kinematic mechanisms to form the basic structure of the robot are discussed. Choosing an appropriate mechanism, geometric dimensions, and mass properties are detailed to develop a dynamics model for the system. Next, the strength of each component is analyzed to finalize its shape. To complete the design procedure, Patran/Nastran was used to apply the finite element method for strength analysis of complicated parts. Also, ADAMS was used to model the mechanisms, where 3D sketch of each component of the robot was generated by means of Solidworks, and several sets of equations governing the dimensions of system were solved using Matlab. Finally, the components are fabricated and assembled together with controlling hardware. Two main processors are used within the control system of the robot. The operator´s PC as the master processor and the laptop installed on the robot as the slave processor. The performance of the system was demonstrated in Rescue robot league of RoboCup 2005 in Osaka (Japan) and achieved the 2nd best design award