Robotics for rescue and risky intervention

Robotics can play important roles that support first response recovery equipment in harsh and dangerous environments while assisting response team to accomplish critical and complex tasks at with or at a distance from hazardous situations. Robotics solutions that are well adapted to local conditions of unstructured and unknown environment can greatly improve safety and security of personnel as well as improve work efficiency, productivity flexibility and reducing secondary damage in disaster area. Solving and fulfilling the needs of reconnaissance, rescue and risky intervention presents challenges for robotics. Many researchers tried to develop robotic technologies for disasters prevention or early warning, intervention and recovery efforts during disasters with all possible kinds of relevant missions while ensuring quality of service, safety and security of human. This article discusses the rescue robotics challenge and states its role and the required technical specifications and functionalities. In addition, the paper introduces brief descriptions of selected rescue robotics projects associated with ground, air and sea for harsh and risky environment.