Quince : A Collaborative Mobile Robotic Platform for Rescue Robots Research and Development

Abstract

Rapid information gathering during the initial stage of investigation is an important process in case of disasters. However this task could be very risky for human rescue crews, when the infrastructure of the building has been compromised or the environment contaminated by nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. To be able to develop robots that can go inside the site instead of humans, several area of robotics need to be addressed and integrated inside a common robotic platform. To facilitate such integrations, we developed a highly maneuverable mobile robot which software and hardware architecture has been designed keeping in mind collaboration between research and development groups of different interests. In this paper, we described the modular interoperable and extensive hardware and software architecture of Quince, a high degree of mobility rescue robot.