RoBoa: Construction and Evaluation of a Steerable Vine Robot for Search and Rescue Applications

TL;DR

RoBoa is a novel vine-like robot designed for search and rescue in collapsed buildings, capable of navigating narrow spaces and locating trapped individuals through a fully functional prototype tested in realistic environments.

Contribution

The paper presents the design, control scheme, and experimental validation of a steerable vine robot for search and rescue, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Findings

Successfully navigated 10 meters in a collapsed building environment.

Able to locate and communicate with trapped persons repeatedly.

Implemented a decentralized control scheme reducing cable complexity.

Abstract

RoBoa is a vine-like search and rescue robot that can explore narrow and cluttered environments such as destroyed buildings. The robot assists rescue teams in finding and communicating with trapped people. It employs the principle of vine robots for locomotion, everting the tip of its tube to move forward. Inside the tube, pneumatic actuators enable lateral movement. The head carries sensors and is mounted outside at the tip of the tube. At the back, a supply box contains the rolled up tube and provides pressurized air, power, computation, as well as an interface for the user to interact with the system. A decentralized control scheme was implemented that reduces the required number of cables and takes care of the low-level control of the pneumatic actuators. The design, characterization, and experimental evaluation of the system and its crucial components is shown. The complete prototype is fully functional and was evaluated in a realistic environment of a collapsed building where the remote-controlled robot was able to repeatedly locate a trapped person after a travel distance of about 10 m.