Design of A Novel Transformable Centaur Robot with Multilateral Control Interface for Search and Rescue Missions

Increasing occurrences of natural and man-made disasters have driven the demand for search and rescue (S&R) robots. However, state-of-the-art S&R robots serve as special-purpose machines with limited use cases. This is in part due to a lack of human-centered designs, particularly in multilateral control and human-robot interactions. Thus, we propose TeleBot-R2, a novel transformable centaur-robot. This robot extends our work presented at the 2018 World Robot Summit, a hybrid humanoid (immersive telepresence) robot with a multilateral control system. Our new version introduces a dual flipper caterpillar track base with an enhanced mechanically dynamic humanoid upper body. This transformer robot can contract into multiple configurations that change it's support polygon and means of locomotion - allowing it to navigate more efficiently through different terrains. Operational awareness is heightened through a VR immersive control interface that interacts with an AI-assisted multilateral control system. This paper presents our mechanical design, control architecture, immersive interfaces, and AI-assistant.