Development of a search and rescue robot system for the underground building environment

Abstract The underground building environment plays an increasingly important role in the construction of modern cities. To deal with possible fires, collapses, and so on, in underground building space, it is a general trend to use rescue robots to replace humans. This paper proposes a dual‐robot system solution for search and rescue in an underground building environment. To speed up rescue and search, the two robots focus on different tasks. However, the environmental perception information and location of them are shared. The primary robot is used to quickly explore the environment in a wide range, identify objects, cross difficult obstacles, and so on. The secondary robot is responsible for grabbing, carrying items, clearing obstacles, and so on. In response to the difficulty of rescue caused by unknown scenes, the Lidar, inertial measurement unit and multiview cameras are integrated for large‐scale 3D environment mapping. The depth camera detects the objects to be rescued and locate them on the map. A six‐degree‐of‐freedom manipulator with a two‐finger gripper is equipped to open doors and clear roadblocks during the rescue. To solve the problem of severe signal attenuation caused by reinforced concrete walls, corners and long‐distance transmission, a wireless multinode networking solution is adopted. In the case of a weak wireless signal, the primary robot uses autonomous exploration for environmental perception. Experimental results show the robots' system has high reliability in over‐the‐horizon maneuvering, teleoperation of the door opening and grasping, object searching, and environmental perception, and can be well applied to underground search and rescue.