WALK-MAN Humanoid Robot : Field Experiments in a Post-earthquake Scenario

Nowadays human intervention is the only effective course of action after a natural or artificial disaster. This is true both for the relief operations where search–and–rescue of survivors is the priority, and for subsequent activities such as the ones devoted to building assessment. In these contexts the use of robotic systems would be beneficial to drastically reduce operators’ risk exposure. The readiness level of the robots still prevents their effective exploitation in relief operations, that are highly critical and characterized by severe time constraints. On the contrary current robotic technologies can be profitably applied in procedures like building assessment after an earthquake. To date, these operations are carried out by engineers and architects who inspect numerous buildings over a large territory, with a high cost in terms of time and assets, and with a high risk due to aftershocks. The main idea is to have the robot acting as an alter-ego of the human operator, who, thanks to a virtual reality device and a body tracking system based on inertial sensors, teleoperates the robot. The goal of this paper is to exploit the perception and manipulation capabilities of the WALK-MAN robot for building assessment in areas affected by earthquakes. The presented work illustrates the hardware and software characteristics of the developed robotic platform, and results obtained with field testing in the real earthquake scenario of Amatrice, Italy. Finally considerations on the experience and feedback provided by civil engineers and architects engaged in the activities are reported and discussed.