Development of Four-Crawler Multilink Mobile Robot MOIRA for Searching Debris

Finding victims in disaster debris is the priority in search-and-rescue operations. Attempts to use robots and other mobile devices instead of humans involve such problems as 1) operating when pressed from 4 sides, 2) difficulty in continuing operation or becoming inoperable when overturned, and 3) robot size restricting mobility on uneven terrain. We developed a robot overcoming these problems and surveying debris too closely packed and/or dangerous for human workers to enter. MOIRA, a linked crawler consisting of 4 linked modules, each having crawlers on 4 sides enabling the robot to solve the above problems and improve navigation on uneven terrain. We discuss the linked crawler and its 4-crawler systemuse and qualitatively demonstrate its feasibility. From experiments on operational performance, we quantitatively evaluated its feasibility.