Autonomous Navigation and Mapping of Snake Robot for Urban Search and Rescue

In an Urban Search and Rescue situation, under extreme time pressure, rescue workers have to locate and extract the trapped people in collapsed structures. Due to the lack of medical treatment, food, and water, the victim's mortality rate dramatically increases over time. Rescue operations for both rescue workers and victims might be as dangerous as the initial event. For such situations, snake robots which are inspired by their biological counterparts, are shown to be a good option in the literature, to help the rescue workers in positioning the victims or delivering life-saving drugs to extend the life of the victims for some time. However, current research mainly focuses on mechanical design, control mechanisms, and gait generation. To alleviate this concern, we have integrated state-of-the-art methods to develop an autonomous snake robot that can navigate in an unknown environment while also generating a 3D map, to provide a better idea of the environment to the rescue workers. A simulated maze environment is implemented and demonstrated by using the CoppeliaSim simulation, running on Robot Operation System (ROS) and Linux OS. The simulation result shows the effectiveness of the proposed autonomous navigation system for the snake robot to plan an obstacle-free path from the robot's current position to the goal position without an apriori knowledge of the environment.