Development of ""Souryu I & II"" -Connected Crawler Vehicle for Inspection of Narrow and Winding Space

In large-scale disasters such as earthquakes, people who have been trapped inside collapsed houses or buildings must be located and rescued as soon as possible, because it becomes difficult to survive, as the time passes. The prototype of ""Connected Crawler Vehicle for Inspection of Narrow and Winding Space"", named ""Souryu"" has been developed for the purpose of searching for such victims. In order to stand practical use, the necessity of easy control and toughness are the basic concepts of this vehicle, and based on these principles, we determined the actual vehicle mechanical characteristics. In this paper, the mechanical design and performance of ""Souryu I"", and the way of improvement for ""Souryu II"" will be discussed and the effectiveness will be confirmed by some basic experiments and field tests.