Rescue Robots and Systems in Japan

Intelligent rescue systems with high information and robot technology have been expected to mitigate disaster damages, especially in Japan after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake. In development of robots for search and rescue tasks it is important to develop a robot which can actually work in a real disaster site. Several robots were used for the search and detection operation in the collapsed World Trade Center building in September 2001. From 2002 "special project for earthquake disaster mitigation in urban areas" (5 years project) launched by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. It aims at significant mitigation the earthquake disaster damage on the scale of the great Hanshin earthquake, in big city regions such as Tokyo metropolitan area and Keihanshin area. In this paper, the problem domain of earthquake disasters and search and rescue processes is clarified with introducing an overview of this project

[1]  Koichi Osuka,et al.  USAR competitions for physically situated robots , 2002, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[2]  Koichi Osuka,et al.  On Robotic Rescue Facilities for Disastrous Earthquakes -From the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake , 1997, J. Robotics Mechatronics.

[3]  Tetsushi Kamegawa,et al.  Development of the snake-like rescue robot "kohga" , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[4]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  Assessment of the NIST Standard Test Bed for Urban Search and Rescue , 2003 .

[5]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center , 2003, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[6]  Hiroaki Kitano,et al.  The RoboCup-Rescue project: a robotic approach to the disaster mitigation problem , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[7]  Adam Jacoff,et al.  A Standard Test Course for Urban Search and Rescue Robots , 2000 .

[8]  Fumitoshi Matsuno,et al.  Development of the Snake-like Rescue Robot. , 2004 .