Development of a Lightweight Cyber-enhanced Rescue Canine Suit with Heat Protection and Anti-slip Countermeasures

A cyber-enhanced rescue canine (CRC) suit was developed to collect and share information such as real-time video, location of the search and rescue (SAR) dog, and behavior analysis, which are important in rescue operation and help enhance the search and rescue performance. Although the CRC suits successfully served its purposes in aiding the rescue team in field tests, some issues regarding the CRC suit were identified: Overheating of the CRC suit and change in suit inclination on the back of the SAR dog. These issues prevent the full utilization of the CRC suit and thus needed to be improved. Here, we propose a lightweight CRC suit with heat protection and anti-slip countermeasures as an improvement over the original CRC suit. With the countermeasures for the Wi-Fi dongle and the camera heating issues, the CRC suit can now be operated at temperatures over 40 °C, whereas the CRC suit inclination problem on the dog was solved by adjusting the length of the chest belt. Further, the proposed CRC suit is lighter (1.2 kg, 18.3% decrease from the old suit in weight) and smaller, which helps reduce the burden on the SAR dog. Furthermore, the performance of the CRC suit was verified by employing the suit in actual scenarios; the CRC suits were provided to SAR dog teams in the eastern and western areas of Japan for training and preparing for actual disasters in the future, respectively.