Development of ALACRANE: A Mobile Robotic Assistance for Exploration and Rescue Missions

The paper presents ALACRANE, a new mobile robot assistant for exploration and rescue missions with dexterous load manipulation capability. ALACRANE consists of a tracked vehicle with a 4-DOF articulated arm, whose end-effector is an independent pair of 3-DOF manipulators (LR-Arms) plus a common rotation on the main arm wrist. All actuators are hydraulic in order to provide a high power-to-size ratio for both traction and manipulation. The system is equipped with CCD and IR cameras and a 3D-laser scanner for victim detection and environment perception. Three operation modes have been envisaged for the robot: navigation, main arm positioning, and LR-Arms operation. The control architecture provides different levels of autonomy and tele-operation for each mode. Preliminary tests with the actual system are presented.