Mechanical design and system architecture of a tracked vehicle robot for urban search and rescue operations

Human rescuers have very short time to find trapped victims in a collapsed structure, otherwise the chance of finding victims still alive is nearly zero. In such a critical situation robots can support rescuers. According to this very demanding tasks the development of the robots is very complex and combines multiple disciplines such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and programming. This mobile platform equipped with a manipulator represents the first stage of an Austrian national founded project. A common background of our above activities is the development of a tracked vehicle with four active flippers to improve the traversability on uneven terrains, the control of the driving mechanism and the system architecture with the experiments in the programming of an embedded real-time processor and a high-performance FPGA from National Instruments to control all sensors and actuators.