Development of an inchworm-type searching robot

This paper describes an inchworm-type robot that we developed for the application of disaster relief, specially for searching victim. The robot we called AIT-ReBo1 has two types of modules, one is the head module that is equipped at the terminal of the robot's body with a small wireless camera and wireless network functions to communicate with outside, another module is the joint that has two rotational and a linear driven degrees of freedom with a decentralized controller module and energy source in a compact form. We pay attention to moving mechanism and realized the motion patterns such as moving straight, side and rotational movements like an inchworm by the progressive wave in body without using any wheels, or crawlers and legs. This robot has already successfully debut at the AICHI EXPO 2005 and stably played for about one month.