No abstract

The natural hazard, mainly earthquake, has caused substantial economic losses and human life loss to many countries. Taiwan, which is located on the western Circum-Pacific seismic belt, has encountered the problem as mentioned earlier in Meishan, Hsinchu-Taichung, and Chi-Chi earthquakes a few years ago. In this study, the researchers propose a novel robot-event integrated system capable of doing the automated inspection and emergency response due to a significant earthquake. When the household’s earthquake warning receiving device picks up an alert, its built-in wireless communications system will send a signal to the robot. The robot commences inspection of the indoor area via real-time image recognition and tracking. It will approach them upon detecting fallen people, regulating their movements via a robot operating system (ROS) monitoring interface. The robot is designed to operate in a house that remains standing with acceptable damage in which the furniture might falling and injure the occupants after an earthquake hit. The indoor experiment conducted to verify the robot system and operation with a designed condition such as fallen and non-fallen people as a detected object. The robot tested to deliver food or medicine for fallen people while waiting for rescuers to arrive. Tests indicate that the proposed smart robot has prospective implementation to the real-world application with more research and development. The smart robot integrated with an earthquake early warning system has a promising approach to the temporary care of people affected by earthquakes.