Application of Robot Technology in Search and Rescue of Earthquake Ruins

Abstract : Destructive earthquakes often cause a large number of people to be buried in the ruins of a building. Therefore, the search and rescue of trapped people is an important task in the field of earthquake emergency work. The search efficiency of the earthquake site is directly related to the success rate of earthquake rescue work and is an important factor in improving the survival rate of trapped people. However, after a strong earthquake, earthquakes often experienced aftershocks and the internal environment of the rubble was dangerous and complex. All this caused great difficulties for rescue workers and threatened the lives of rescue workers. Combining the current research status of the rapidly developing search and rescue robot technology and the practical problems encountered in earthquake emergency rescue, the research idea of the earthquake rescue equipment robotization is proposed. The purpose is to propose the actual needs of the earthquake rescue personnel for the auxiliary search and rescue robot. At the same time, the research status of the earthquake site search and rescue robot series completed by the China Earthquake Emergency Search and Rescue Center and several domestic institutions has been introduced, and its advantages and disadvantages have been analyzed. The work done can improve the efficiency of on-site search and rescue, as well as the further development and industrialization of earthquake rescue robots.

Keywords : Earthquake damage scene ; Rescue equipment ; Ruin search ; Rescue robot

Earthquake disasters on a global scale are constantly occurring, presenting great challenges to current on-site rescue technologies. Especially after a destructive earthquake, as a professional earthquake rescue worker, how to use scientific rescue methods and advanced technical equipment to rescue survivors and minimize losses is our top priority. However, extremely harsh on-site rescue environments, such as frequent aftershocks, narrow gaps, dangerous building ruins, and even toxic environments and radiation environments, will greatly affect the efficiency and effectiveness of rescue operations, and often even threaten the lives of rescue workers. . With the continuous maturity of robotics technology and the rapid development of other disaster relief robots, it has brought tremendous impetus to the improvement of our earthquake rescue robotization.

From the earliest development and application of fire and rescue robots, the United States, "9.11" terrorist attacks, the successful rescue robot search and rescue in the ruins of the World Trade Center, and then to "3.11" earthquake in Japan, the search positioning robot As well as the application of nuclear accident handling robots, we have seen the necessity and feasibility of robotic rescue. This article describes the support of the China Earthquake Search and Rescue Center and the Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai University in support of the “ 863 ” Plan Eleventh Five-Year Key Project. Next, we jointly developed and developed a series of robot search robots for earthquake debris search and assisted rescue. We also analyzed the data related to functional tests and experiments conducted by robot prototypes in a simulated seismic debris environment at a national earthquake emergency rescue training base. The reliability of search and assist rescue robots developed was analyzed, and the deficiencies and areas for improvement were analyzed. This has important practical significance for accelerating the intelligence of earthquake rescue equipment, improving the technical level of earthquake rescue equipment, and promoting the industrialization of rescue robots.

1 Difficulties encountered in earthquake emergency search and rescue

After the earthquake, national and provincial earthquake emergency rescue teams, local fire rescue teams, and other special-purpose rescue teams all shoulder important hopes of the country and the people. They all made every effort to search for trapped people in the earthquake-stricken areas. Rescue work. With "5.12" earthquake, for example, put the total number of rescue about 17 people, including People's Liberation Army and armed police forces of about 13. 70,000, mining, hazardous rescue team of about 4,000 people, fire and earthquakes professional rescue team 1. 80,000 people, including 96 domestic professional rescue teams and 8 international rescue teams, for a total of 1 . 70,000 people. While achieving great success in earthquake relief, we also face many difficulties and areas for improvement.

The first is the urgency of rescue time. According to the golden 72-hour rescue principle, in order to ensure that trapped persons have a chance of survival and rescue, earthquake rescue workers must achieve rapid response and effective rescue, which requires rescue teams to complete a large number of rubble search and rescue operations in a short period of time. The physical and mental aspects of the team have brought great challenges. Many earthquake site workers have continuous work experiences of 24 hours and even 72 hours . Even if the rest is short-lived, fatigue will inevitably lead to work efficiency. Falling, threatening the health of the players and even their lives.

Followed by the dangerous environment of the ruins. Earthquake ruins are an extremely unstable type of structure. In addition, there may be aftershocks that may cause secondary or even multiple collapses. This moment threatens the safety of rescue workers. In particular, a destructive earthquake may cause damage to dangerous buildings and other buildings. Numerous nuclear pollution also threaten the health and safety of rescue teams.

Once again, it is a small rescue space. As shown in Fig. 1(a) , because trapped persons are often buried in complex collapsed structures, rescuers are difficult to pass through narrow collapsed gaps, and in order not to cause artificial secondary collapse, heavy equipment is often abandoned. Through small rescue tools , open the rescue channel and rescue trapped people, which brings certain difficulties to the rescue work.

Figure 1 Search and rescue operations in earthquake ruins

Finally, search and rescue equipment needs to be localized. At present, national earthquake rescue team equipment, especially search equipment, mainly rely on foreign imports. Although the imported equipment features perfect and advanced technology. However, due to its detection and maintenance needs to be handled abroad, this has brought difficulties to our daily maintenance and emergency response, especially the maintenance and repair during the on-site rescue process. Once it is damaged in the rescue process, it cannot be repaired in time.

To sum up, earthquake relief is a time-critical, high-risk, and extremely complex task. Therefore, we started the development of a series of localized earthquake search and assisted rescue robots. This series of robots can replace the rescue team members in the rubble of trapped personnel search and positioning, especially in some dangerous sites. At the same time, the robot is small in size and can pass through small gaps that cannot be passed by humans . It has strong mobility and rapid progress in the ruin environment . It can also work continuously for days and nights and can free a large number of rescue teams to perform full-time rescue work.

2 Earthquake rescue equipment robotization improvement

In recent years, especially after the "9 • 11" terrorist attacks, many countries in the world from the perspective of the military and rescue began developing anti-terrorism, anti-chemical warfare, rescue and other special robots. In particular, countries with frequent natural disasters such as Japan, the United States, and China have invested a large amount of manpower and material resources. According to research characteristics and types of disasters in their respective countries, research and development of rescue robots with independent intellectual property rights have been carried out. Such as Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology, Toshiba Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation, etc .; University of California in the United States, University of South Florida, University of Minnesota, Foster - Miller Corporation, etc .; Shenyang Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shanghai University Wait. The RobCup Robotics Competition has also added RobCup Rescue Special Robot Rescue Competition. At the same time , at the IEEE SSRR conference held in Kobe, Japan in 2005 , experts from various countries discussed and proposed : "In the future disaster reduction and rescue, the robot as an effective means will become an indispensable part of the social infrastructure." The research and development theme of the research has promoted the rapid development of rescue robot technology around the world. Especially in Japan, "3.11" earthquake and tsunami caused nuclear contamination disaster, sounded the alarm worldwide earthquake search and rescue work, how the rescue is working in toxic or nuclear radiation environment, it has become a hot research, The development of earthquake rescue robots is imperative.

Therefore, the China Earthquake Emergency Search and Rescue Center combined with the difficulties encountered in the current rescue process, proposed an improved robot rescue robotization program, and together with related scientific research units, completed the series of robots for seismic search and assisted rescue. This series of robots is divided into aerial rotor search and rescue robots, ruin surface search robots and narrow slot search robots. It can realize the three-dimensional search and rescue of the earthquake site. This series of robots has the following advantages over traditional manual search.

First, the robot can fly through crawler crawlers and propellers, and its speed is faster than rescue workers walking on the rubble ; secondly, the robot has strong load-bearing capacity and can carry a variety of sensors to realize the interior of the rubble, maps, sound, gas, and temperature. Detection can find the trapped person's position more effectively ; at the same time, the maneuverability and handling and dismantling ability of the robot are stronger than ordinary humans, and the battery supply can continuously work to improve the efficiency of search and rescue ; finally, the form of robot rescue is improved. The safety factor of the rescue team can avoid casualties caused by the second collapse. In the future, through the continuous improvement of the robot's performance and perception capabilities, as well as large-scale rescue personnel operation and training, the series of earthquake rescue robots can be put into the field work of the existing national earthquake emergency rescue team.

3 Application effects of this series of earthquake rescue robots

The development of rescue robots is a process of modular function integration . Rescue robots have a variety of functional modules such as operations, search, identification, communication, and control. This requires research and development and integration of related modules, and ultimately carries sensor modules such as infrared, CCD , and wall-wrapped radars to form powerful remote-controlled robots. Earthquake rescue equipment.

The aerial rotor search and rescue robot shown in Fig. 2(a) effectively solved the problem that the disaster information in the disaster-stricken areas could not be grasped in a timely and accurate manner in the earthquake emergency rescue, and the difficulty of the search and rescue team in the rubble and the destruction of the road was slow. It can fly into the earthquake-stricken area for the first time, and pass the scene information back to the rescue command center through the CCD camera. At the same time, the robot can carry 40 kg of emergency supplies such as food or medicine and can be delivered to the designated area through remote control. Realize on-site replenishment. In particular, the robot can navigate through GPS satellites, enabling it to operate in inclement weather and at night. The robot specific parameters shown in Table 1:

The rubble surface search robot shown in Fig. 2(b) adopts a tracked design that can span 30 ° obstacle stairs. The emergence of the robot can replace the rescue team in the case of frequent aftershocks, access to dangerous buildings, and carry out search and positioning of trapped personnel. The robot has sensor modules such as camera, audio, and gas detection. It can transmit the influence and sound data in the rubble to the instruments outside the rubble in real time through the wireless network, and can measure the concentration of oxygen in the rubble and the presence of harmful gases. . Rescue team members can search for collapsed ruins by simply observing the screen of the instrument and operating through the handle. This will greatly ensure the safety of the rescue team members and improve the efficiency and accuracy of on-site rescue.

Figure 2 Physical map of seismic search robot

The narrow slot search robot shown in Fig. 2(c) also uses a crawler design, but unlike a ruined surface robot, its size is smaller and it can be deformed according to the size of the gap so as to better pass through the gap. . There are four specific deformation modes: triangular, side-by-side, linear, and D- shaped. The linear type can be used to bring three tracks into one line. At this time, the robot has a width of only 20 cm . It can drill into small gaps that the rescue team can't enter, reducing search and rescue dead angles. At the same time, it can carry relevant images or other sensing modules. , pass the internal information of the ruins structure to the rescue personnel who are outside the control.

4 deficiency and improvement

Through multiple search and rescue experiments and exercises in the ruins environment, preliminary design indicators for earthquake rescue robots have been implemented so that search and rescue assistance can be realized in earthquake debris, as shown in Figure 1(b) . Rescue team members work at the same time. However, we still need continuous improvement and improvement in the future, so that the search and rescue capabilities of this series of robots are more complete.

The first is the stability of the wireless transmission signal. The inner environment of the earthquake ruins is complex and there are many obstacles, which brings certain obstacles to the existing point-to-point infinite interaction between robots and operators. When the distance to the ruins is long and there are many obstacles in the middle, video signal attenuation and loss will occur.

Followed by the robot's endurance. The surface of the slot of the robot are used in a 24 V, 10 A / h battery of Li, continuously working time is generally 2 ~ 3 h, the future need to be optimized from the perspective of its power consumption, prolong the use time and power necessary to design Prompt interface and low-battery alarm, so as to prevent the robot from working inside the rubble due to running out of battery, and even trapped in the rubble.

Once again, the existing optimization and improvement of the rescue robot body structure, such as improving the robot's smoothness and passability, improving the ability of the robot to face the complex road conditions in the rubble, as well as the ability to prevent dumping ; again as a miniaturization of the robot research, because The experimental ruin environment is still an ideal experimental environment. In the actual scene, there may be a more narrow and harsh ruin environment. However, if the size is too small, it will also affect the robot's ability to pass and its smoothness.

Finally, the human-machine interaction technology of the robot is optimized to improve its maneuverability, especially for non-robot professional rescue team members. This is also an important part of the future series of earthquake search and rescue robots that can be widely promoted. How to make the operation mode simple, easy to learn, and realize a good interactive man-machine technology is a key part of future research.

5 Conclusion

Earthquake emergency rescue is an important part of the current earthquake site work. It has the characteristics of tight time and heavy tasks. The efficiency of earthquake search and rescue is directly related to the life safety of trapped people. Only rapid and accurate search and positioning of people trapped by earthquakes can improve the success rate of our later rescue. On the other hand, the aftershocks that may occur at any time, the complex and dangerous ruin environment, and even harmful gases all bring great difficulties to our rescue work, especially the lives of earthquake rescue team members. As an earthquake researcher, how to effectively and accurately complete the search and rescue of rubble, and to ensure the safety of the rescue workers as much as possible, has become the focus of our research. Combining the research trends of emergency rescue equipment at home and abroad, we proposed the concept of robotization of emergency rescue equipment. Together with research institutes such as Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai University, we completed the development of the series of earthquake search and rescue robots. Through a large number of simulation experiments, the feasibility and reliability of this series of robots are verified. However, the series of rescue robots are still waiting for the actual earthquake rescue test, especially the complex and varied seismic field environment. To this end, we must continue to explore and optimize : the need to further develop the reliability of remote control ; need to further improve the human-computer interaction operation ; need to further improve the reliability of the robot itself. However, we have reason to believe that with the continuous development of robotics technology and the continuous maturation of sensors and infinite communication technologies, in the near future, we can achieve the search for intelligent ruins of single robots, as well as the collaborative earthquake disaster area of ​​water, land, and air robots. Area stereo search and rescue.

This article is from "Journal of Natural Disasters" Volume 21, Issue 5.