Earthshaker: A Mobile Rescue Robot for Emergencies and Disasters through Teleoperation and Autonomous Navigation

To deal with emergencies and disasters without rescue workers being exposed to dangerous environments, this paper presents a mobile rescue robot, Earthshaker. As a combination of a tracked chassis and a six-degree-of-freedom robotic arm, as well as miscellaneous sensors and controllers, Earthshaker is capable of traversing diverse terrains and fulfilling dexterous manipulation. Specifically, Earthshaker has a unique swing arm – dozer blade structure that can help clear up cumbersome obstacles and stabilize the robot on stairs, a multimodal teleoperation system that can adapt to different transmission conditions, a depth camera aided robotic arm and gripper that can realize semi-autonomous manipulation, a LiDAR aided base that can achieve autonomous navigation in unknown areas. It was these special systems that supported Earthshaker to win the first Advanced Technology & Engineering Challenge (A-TEC) championships, standing out of 40 robots from the world and showing the efficacy of system integration and the advanced control philosophy behind it.