This paper presents the development and control methodology of a military rescue robot for a casualty extraction task. The new rescue robot (HURCULES) equipped with electric actuators for the casualty extraction task on the battle field is introduced. In this paper, mechanical designs of the HURCULES are described in detail. One of the noticeable features in the mechanical design is to use the worm gear in the joint to maintain the safety of the casualty even with power‐off and to reduce the energy through a selected operating mode. Moreover, unlike the upper body of a conventional humanoid robot, the chest plate is installed and used to properly distribute the casualty’s weight to the dual‐arm manipulator and the chest plate when carrying the wounded person. The HURCULES is valuable because the rescue robots for use on the battle field are very rare. And, the HURCULES is the first rescue robot for use on the battle field in South Korea. Primarily, a semiautonomous control strategy is applied to the HURCULES. The maneuvering stability of the HURCULES is needed when approaching and escaping a casualty while maneuvering on uneven terrain, and it maintains autonomously by the HURCULES. A variety of maneuvering experiments on various terrains were conducted, and satisfactory results for the casualty extraction task were obtained. In particular, the field experiments in this paper were performed at an accredited test site. Besides, additional experiments were conducted to enhance the field applicability.

No abstract

An active vibration suppression system is designed using a multiobjective state-feedback controller. The governing equation of motion for a piezo/beam system is derived using Hamilton's principle. The control gains of the resulting system are selected using the theory of robust controls. In this regard, a robust controller is designed using a H 2 /H ∞ feedback control law that satisfies additional constraints on the closed-loop pole location in the face of model uncertainties, which are derived for a general class of convex regions of the complex plane. These constraints are expressed in terms of the linear matrix inequalities approach for multiobjective synthesis. The validity and applicability of this approach for vibration suppression for the piezo/beam system by damping out the multiple vibrational modes of the piezo/beam system are discussed.

This paper introduces a new rescue robot consisting of dual-manipulator and variable configuration mobile platform for multi-purpose such as casualty extraction and hazardous goods transport. A specific rescue motion strategy using a whole-body is suggested to tackle characteristics of the robot configuration and balancing issue. In order to take into account safety and stability of the robot during the rescue motions, some restrictions are reflected into redundant domain of the robot with different priority. For stable motion control in various scenarios, a singularityrobust inverse kinematics is adopted and modified to induce smoother robot movement. The robustness of the control approach is checked numerically by comparing other method and experiments for the rescue motion strategy are carried out by using a small-scaled simulator in place of the rescue robot under development.