On-rubble robot systems for the DDT Project

Intelligent rescue systems with advanced information and robot technology have been expected to mitigate disaster damage, particularly in Japan after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. It is important that the robots developed for search and rescue tasks can actually work at a real disaster site. Several robots were used for the search and detection operation in the collapsed World Trade Center building in September 2001. In 2002, the DDT Project (Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas, III-4 Development of Advanced Robots and Information Systems for Disaster Response) was launched by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan). It was a 5-year project for 2002-2007. It aimed at developing necessary technologies for mitigating the damage caused by large-scale earthquakes of the scale of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, occurring in densely populated areas in big city regions such as the Tokyo metropolitan area and Keihanshin area. In this paper, we introduce the activities of the mission unit for the information collection by on-rubble mobile platforms.