Fire incident is a disaster that can potentially cause the loss of life, property damage and permanent disability to the affected victim. They can also suffer from prolonged psychological and trauma. Fire fighters are primarily tasked to handle fire incidents, but they are often exposed to higher risks when extinguishing fire, especially in hazardous environments such as in nuclear power plant, petroleum refineries and gas tanks. They are also faced with other difficulties, particularly if fire occurs in narrow and restricted places, as it is necessary to explore the ruins of buildings and obstacles to extinguish the fire and save the victim. With high barriers and risks in fire extinguishment operations, technological innovations can be utilized to assist firefighting. Therefore, this paper presents the development of a firefighting robot dubbed QRob that can extinguish fire without the need for fire fighters to be exposed to unnecessary danger. QRob is designed to be compact in size than other conventional fire-fighting robot in order to ease small location entry for deeper reach of extinguishing fire in narrow space. QRob is also equipped with an ultrasonic sensor to avoid it from hitting any obstacle and surrounding objects, while a flame sensor is attached for fire detection. This resulted in QRob demonstrating capabilities of identifying fire locations automatically and ability to extinguish fire remotely at particular distance. QRob is programmed to find the fire location and stop at maximum distance of 40 cm from the fire. A human operator can monitor the robot by using camera which connects to a smartphone or remote devices.

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The main characteristics of robot are the precision work with a high degree of reliability and the repetitive over long period that makes it suitable for use in the medical field. In this paper, the control and analysis of robot arm for the human wrist rehabilitation by using flexible pneumatic cylinder is introduced. The system consists of a slave arm, a master arm, a high-speed microcomputer, compact and inexpensive quasi-servo valves, a potentiometer and accelerometers to give the references for the attitude control. The robot arm has three degrees-of-freedom that is bending, extending and contracting. The control performances of the robot arm were investigated and the analytical model of the whole robot arm system including the flexible pneumatic cylinder, the quasi-servo valves and an embedded controller was proposed and tested for estimating the performance theoretically. We also made comparisons between the calculated and experimental results to confirm the validities of the proposed model and the identified system parameters. The results from experiments show that the proposed models accurately predict the behavior of the tested flexible robot arm using flexible pneumatic cylinders. The proposed master-slave control system has a potential for application for robot-assisted rehabilitation and training especially for human wrist.

<div class=""abs_img""><img src=""[disp_template_path]/JRM/abst-image/00270006/12.jpg"" width=""300"" /> Flexible robot arm</div>Robots, due to their excellent speed, accuracy and cost-effectiveness in repetitive tasks, now have a tendency to be used in rehabilitation field. A simple trajectory control of robot arm using flexible pneumatic cylinders and embedded controller which can be used as rehabilitation for human wrist is described. The system consists of the flexible robot arm, an accelerometer, an embedded microcomputer, a potentiometer and compact quasi-servo valves. The analytical model for trajectory control is proposed and applied on the flexible pneumatic robot arm. The proposed trajectory control method does not need a linearized model which is commonly used in a robot arm. The flexible structure has the characteristics of high safety such as not to cause harm to user and is suitable for use in therapeutic devices. The trajectory control can help patients recover more quickly by repeating the movements based on the patient's individual condition. Both experiment and simulation show that the trajectory control of robot arm can be realized for several kinds of trajectory by using the proposed control method and the tested robot arm.

In the case of damp and wet pipes, pipe inspection robots using pneumatic actuators offer advantages such as no electrical leakage and short circuit. In the previous study, a robot consisting of sliding/bending mechanisms using parallel arranged three extension type flexible pneumatic actuators and two holding mechanisms was successfully developed. In order to use the robot in thinner pipe, a novel and simpler propulsion mechanism utilising the difference of frictional force moving forward and backward are proposed and tested in this work. There are two mechanisms, which are “wriggling type” and “cilia type”. The “wriggling type” mechanism moves forward by wriggling its body while the “cilia type” mechanism moves by using plate type cilia that covered on the mechanism. Both mechanisms have been tested in the pipeline. As a result, it can be confirmed that the cilia type propulsion mechanism can travel in the pipe with accumulated water. It can be found that the mechanism can easily travel through corners while twisting its body by giving bending motion toward any direction.