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Development of "Souryu I & II" -Connected Crawler Vehicle for Inspection of Narrow and Winding Space
Toshio Takayama and Shigeo Hirose
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1, O-okayama Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152-8552 Japan
Received:June 12, 2002Accepted:November 1, 2002Published:February 20, 2003
Keywords:connected crawler vehicle, inspection, rescue
Abstract
In large-scale disasters such as earthquakes, people who have been trapped inside collapsed houses or buildings must be located and rescued as soon as possible, because it becomes difficult to survive, as the time passes. The prototype of "Connected Crawler Vehicle for Inspection of Narrow and Winding Space", named "Souryu" has been developed for the purpose of searching for such victims. In order to stand practical use, the necessity of easy control and toughness are the basic concepts of this vehicle, and based on these principles, we determined the actual vehicle mechanical characteristics. In this paper, the mechanical design and performance of "Souryu I", and the way of improvement for "Souryu II" will be discussed and the effectiveness will be confirmed by some basic experiments and field tests.
Cite this article as:T. Takayama and S. Hirose, “Development of "Souryu I & II" -Connected Crawler Vehicle for Inspection of Narrow and Winding Space,” J. Robot. Mechatron., Vol.15 No.1, pp. 61-69, 2003.Data files:
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