No abstract

The unprecedented scale and number of natural and man-made disasters in the past decade has urged international emergency search and rescue communities to seek for novel technology to enhance operation efficiency. Tele-operated search and rescue robots that can navigate deep into rubble to search for victims and to transfer critical field data back to the control console has gained much interest among emergency response institutions. In response to this need, a low-cost autonomous mini robot equipped with thermal sensor, accelerometer, sonar, pin-hole camera, microphone, ultra-bright LED and wireless communication module is developed to study the control of a group of decentralized mini search and rescue robots. The robot can navigate autonomously between voids to look for living body heat and can send back audio and video information to allow the operator to determine if the found object is a living human. This paper introduces the design and control of a low-cost robotic search and rescue system based on an immuno control framework developed for controlling decentralized systems. Design and development of the physical prototype and the immunity-based control system are described in this paper.

No abstract

Distributed control paradigm offers robustness, scalability, and simplicity to the control and organization of module based systems. MSR (Mcdular Self-Recontigurable) robot is a class of robot that best demonstrate the effectiveness of distributed systems as all modules in the robot are individuals that perform their own actuation and computation; the behavior of the complete robot is a collective behavior of all independent modules. In this paper, a general control tinmework, named General Suppression Framework, is proposed and a distributed control system based on the framework is presented The control system is designed to conk01 a set of MSR robots configured into a planar manipulator arm. All modules in the manipulator arm contain their own processing and actnation units, which allow them to evaluate and react to the environment independently. The modules can perform passive communication with their immediate neighbors and can exhibit aggressive or tolerant behavior based on the environment change to generate emergent group behaviors. A simulation program is developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the distributed system in controlling the module based planar manipulator arm.