Two attempts at linking robots with disaster information: InfoBalloon and gareki engineering

The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in the early morning of 17 January 1995 made us aware that the infrastructure of our technological society is so fragile and unreliable in case of disasters beyond our supposition. A large number of buildings were smashed into fragments and over 6000 people were killed under the buildings without technological aid. The earthquake also destroyed the means of advanced communication based on IT. People living in the area were isolated from disaster information provided by the mass media. The Ž rst author, a resident of Kobe City, felt strongly that we lacked two important parts for constructing effective rescue support systems: robot systems for disaster information and disaster information for robot development. From 1996 our research group at Osaka University has been studying the linkage between robots and disaster information, and have proposed robotic systems and a research framework. This short paper introduces the outlines of these two research topics.