Integration of a sub-crawlers' autonomous control in Quince highly mobile rescue robot

Abstract

Rapid information gathering during the initial stage of investigation is an important process in case of disasters. However this task could be very risky for human rescue crews, when the infrastructure of the building has been compromised or the environment contaminated by nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. To be able to develop robots that can go inside the site instead of humans, several area of robotics need to be addressed and integrated inside a common robotic platform. In this paper, we described the modular interoperable and extensive hardware and software architecture of Quince, a high degree of mobility crawler type rescue robot having four independent sub-crawlers. To facilitate Quince's navigability, we developed and integrated a semi-autonomous control algorithm that helps the remote operator driving Quince while the flippers are autonomously adjusting to the environment. The robot is then able to overcome obstacles and steps without a special training of the operator. We present here the software integration and the control strategy of the flippers using the embedded basic version of Quince.