The Research Of A Soft Rescue Robot

Plenty of natural and man-made disasters happen every year around the world, which cause a lot of damage to property and casualties. Except for taking preventive measures to these disasters, saving more survivors after the disasters becomes really critical. With the development of robotic technology, some of the robots are already capable of helping the rescue crew and improve the efficiency of rescue missions. Under this circumstance, the paper proposed a pneumatic soft robot for disaster relief using the latest soft robot technology.The soft rescue robot mentioned in the paper is designed particularly for narrow passages in ruins. The robot system consists of a soft rescue robot in the front, flexible silicon rubber tubes, pneumatic control platform in the back and a control system in PC. The soft rescue robot is composed of two annular grippers on both ends, a soft actuator and a 2-DOF soft joint in the middle, with fine design, the maximum diameter of the robot is 80mm and the length is 250mm. The silicon rubber tube is 4 meters long which means the robot can enter into narrow passages less than 4 meters in length. The whole system is driven by compressed air and the robot moves with peristaltic motion.After finishing the mechanical design, the robot is analyzed with mechanics and some of the design parameters are settled. Both classical mechanics theory and Mooney-Rivlin strain energy density theory are applied to the modelling of the soft actuator, thus the relation between pressure and elongation is acquired. FEA (ABAQUS) simulation was conducted to analyze the soft 2-DOF joint and the relation between the pressure and bending angle is acquired.At last, a narrow unstructured passage mimicking the disastrous ruins was constructed and experiments were performed to investigate the capability of the robot. Result shows the soft rescue robot is capable of navigating through the narrow unstructured passage with the speed of 7.5m/h. It is also capable of passing turns and climbing a ramp with an angle of 25 degree. The above experiments indicate that the soft rescue robot can finish some simple disaster relief tasks.