Development of rescue manipulator to search narrow space for victims

Recently, disasters such as earthquakes and so on occur at various places, and rescue operation using robots has attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose a new rescue robot with duplex mechanism that is realized by connecting two manipulators in parallel. We have demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of the proposed system by developing a prototype system. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008