An evaluation test field design for a USAR robot related to a collapsed Japanese house

Since 2001, RoboCup Rescue Robot League(RRRL) has been held in order to promote continuous development of Urban Search And Rescue(USAR) robot. In RRRL, the rules and field have been established based on mainly collapsed concrete buildings, and this common rules and field of RRRL have accelerated the world-wide cooperation in the development of the USAR robots. However, it should be mentioned that there are regional differences of the disaster situations. The differences are clear when one compares the collapsed concrete buildings and Japanese wooden ones. In this paper, two test fields, Flexible Step and Jungle Gym, have been proposed to evaluate USAR robot performance by considering the characteristics of the collapsed Japanese houses. These fields require the robot with light weight, small, and capable of precise movement, which are not directly required in the performance metric of the current RRRL. The effectiveness of the fields is verified in RRRL Japan Open.