Disaster is an inevitable part of life. While we can’t stop it from striking, we can, however, be prepared so that when it does strike, we have what it takes to salvage the situation and save lives. Thanks to technological advancement in the robotic development, more lives can be saved while ensuring that rescuers will be safe themselves. However, the many concepts in the works have been individual developments so far. In other words, the individual developments that cover aerial and terrestrial operations have never come together to demonstrate what they can do together to become an effective force in a search and rescue operation.
That changes last November when National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics, a robotic center launched by Swiss National Science Foundation, demoed an integrated aerial and terrestrial robots rescue mission in a mock up disaster witnessed by a review panel. The demonstration involved robots developed by the various universities under the NCCR Robotics and they including a drone for aerial survey, a quadrupedal robot called ANYmal for ground search, a foldable cargo drone for medicine delivery, an amphibious creature-inspired low crawling robot for accessing narrow crevices, and a snake-like limbless robot that can navigate through water ways.
Have a look the November demo session below:
Image: YouTube.
