Design ground bio-inspired micro-robot structures for detecting humans in disasterus regions

The rapid deployment of rescue teams for saving lives in natural or artificial disasters is critically depended by the information collected from the disaster area. There are different types of information (visual, audio, smelling, other) collected from the disastrous areas. Rescuing humans under debris is a very difficult task for the first responders due to several constraints, such as time limitation, the unknown structure of the destroyed buildings, the difficulty to collect information beneath the structures, etc. The collection of information beneath destroyed structures requires the accurate description of the 3D representation of the space and the correct location of the human subject under the debris. This paper deals with the design of a micro-robot, called Thiseas, capable to select visual and audio information beneath destroyed buildings and locate human subjects in areas (like small holes or deep underground cavities) that other devices (like large robots) or equipment (like ultra sounds) don't offer.