Research On The Auxiliary Rescue Robot In Narrow Space Of Ruins

The earthquake disasters take place frequently worldwide, bringing hugelosses of life and possession to the relevant countries and people. In the currentrescue operations, the rescuers usually employ the manual or semiautomatic toolsin the complex ruins environment to handle the task such as cutting and jackingwork to open up a rescue channel, in which way are the efficiency of rescue workgreatly reduced and the life security of rescuers threatened by the dangerouspost-disaster environment all the time. This paper, under the aid of the National863Program “Research, development and application of the search and rescuerobot oriented towards the earthquake emergency”, is aimed at developing arescue robot prototype which could make entrance into the narrow space of ruinsas well as the cutting and jacking rescue tools and a related manipulat or tofacilitate the rescue workers to go deep into the narrow space and establish therescue channel.According to the performance indicators and function requirements, amodular tracked rescue robot which is compact-sized and equipped with rescuetools was designed. The car units of the robot body are connected with each otherusing spatial parallel mechanism, which realizes better strength and reliability.Moreover, such connection makes it possible that the vehicle body activelycomplete pitching and yawing movements, while the movement of the passiverolling freedom along the vehicle’s axis be controlled with brake, increasing theadaptability of the robot to the complex earthquake environment.In terms of the volume restriction of the recue robot body and the functionrequirements, two compact-sized jacking tools which had big travel range weredesigned as well as the robot arm to position them. In addition, an electric cuttingtools and a three degree of freedom robot arm whose end fastened and held thecutting tools, were designed. The rescue robot with high passing ability carriesthe cutting and jacking tools and their corresponding manipulators to achieveremote operations, which improves the rescue capacity for the robot to go deepinto the narrow space of ruins.As the kinematics analysis lays the foundation for robot control, in order todetermine the relationship between joint movements and the end position, thisthesis analyzed the kinematics of the manipulators and the parallel driving joints.The ADAMS software was used for virtual mechanism simulation of the paralleldriving joints and the jacking tools’ manipulator to verify the structural design’s rationality. By reason that the jacking tools need to bear heavy load, the finiteelement analysis software ANSYS WORKBENCH was employed to achieve itsstatics analysis and strength verification, which further examined whether thestrength and rigidity could meet the demands.Finally, the experimental prototype of the rescue robot, the rescue tools andthe related manipulators were developed, and then the control software wasdesigned based on VC++6.0to facilitate the remote control. Aiming at the test ofthe high passing ability and remote operation capacity of the rescue robot,experiments including hill-climbing, fast moving, obstacle crossing, cutting andjacking work were conducted. Experimental results showed that the rescue robotcould climb300mm high vertical obstacles, go across400mm wide ditch, and thecutting tool could deal with10mm diameter steel, and that the travel range of thetwo jacking tools could reach50-100mm and70-400mm separately, both ofwhich could support500kg of weight.