Improvement of the remote operability for the arm-equipped tracked vehicle HELIOS IX

This work presents the development of an arm-equipped tracked vehicle named HELIOS IX for search and rescue tasks in urban environments. HELIOS IX operator has to tele-operate several tasks such as opening of doors, negotiation of stairs and handling objects. However due to the complexity and kinematics of the system, these tasks are difficult to be carried out without some level of automation. This study proposes one of the shared autonomy type operator-supporting system for HELIOS IX. It is based on a laser range finder (LRF), finger-attached LED beam guiding systems and on a finger 3 axes force sensor interfaced by a novel reinforcing metal plate. Carrying out several experiments we could demonstrate that, tele-operation task can become easier by the introduction of the 3D space approaching assistance of the LRF, object grasping assistance of the LED beams attached on the fingers, and by the force following assistance of the force sensor attached to the wrist.

I. INTRODUCTION

Gathering information in a building polluted by BC terrorism is a very important task as well as the rescue and the urgent medical treatment for survivors. With the advance of technology and research, robots are expected to become a neuralgic supporting tools for responders. Mobile platforms are required to demonstrate the ability to open doors, negotiate stairs, handling suspicious objects while being remotely controlled. Various robots and system for this purpose have been developed and proposed. The robot introduced in [1] can move on stairs and open doors by using 2 robotic arms. However robot and controller are rather big and while they can be applied for tasks in nuclear plants, for search and rescue operations they would result in a bulky and difficult to be deployed solution. [2] proposes a platform capable of opening doors too. Though this robot cannot pass the door with the only operation of its arm, it can push or pull doors by a suction disk mounted on its front. The above systems have all a man in the loop, however fully autonomous systems on the other hand, have been studied and developed for home applications. For this kind of approaches, several issues must be addressed in order to have autonomous machines capable of interacting with the home environment. In the case of the robot presented in [3] it is assumed to know the position of the door and its knob. The robot can then open doors automatically. In [4], a laser range finder is utilized to recognize the door and its knob autonomously. The autonomous behavior of the above mobile platforms shows excellent capabilities, however, the recognition of doors, knobs, and the generation of the opening motion needs a lot of computational power due to the calculation complexity. Our research targets time-sensitive situations carried out with HELIOS IX platform: 1)

The approach of object with the manipulator

2)

Grasping objects

3)

Rotating doorknobs or valves

4)

Opening doors

Fig. 1. Developed arm-equipped tracked vehicle HELIOS IX