Development of a transformational mobile robot to search victims under debris and rubble. 2nd report: improvement of mechanism and interface

Mobile robots are expected to support relief activities, after a great scale disaster. These robots need ability to move on/in rubble in order to collect information related to victims and the conditions. In order to attain this purpose, we proposed a transformational mobile robot (CUBIC-R), which can traverse rubble omni-directional. The robot's shape is regular hexahedron and each surface has a crawler unit with a couple of crawlers. As each surface is united by transformational mechanism which has IDOF, it can overcome rough terrains (step, stairs, gap and so on) using transformation. Additionally, it can traverse terrains in the direction of the front, back, left or right without rotating the platform, because its shape is cross-shape. As the robot can traverse terrains in the left or right direction if it can not overcome obstacles in the front or back directions, stuck possibility of the robot may be small. Therefore we consider that CUBIC-R can be operated widely in the stricken-area. However, we found that there were several problems in CUBIC-R, such as the heavy weight, the complexity of the mechanism, the stability of the robot and the difficult robot operation. In this paper, we improve the robot mechanism focused on the operability and develop a fundamental robot/human interface in order to solve the above-mentioned problems.