Field Insights for Portable Vine Robots in Urban Search and Rescue

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the capabilities of a soft vine robot system, SPROUT, in simulated collapsed structures to assess its potential for urban search and rescue operations, highlighting its strengths and areas for improvement.

Contribution

It introduces a set of experiments testing a vine robot in engineered collapse scenarios, demonstrating its navigation abilities and identifying key development needs.

Findings

SPROUT can grow through tight spaces and around corners.

Sensorization improvements are needed for better control.

System portability and reliability can be enhanced.

Abstract

Soft, growing vine robots are well-suited for exploring cluttered, unknown environments, and are theorized to be performant during structural collapse incidents caused by earthquakes, fires, explosions, and material flaws. These vine robots grow from the tip, enabling them to navigate rubble-filled passageways easily. State-of-the-art vine robots have been tested in archaeological and other field settings, but their translational capabilities to urban search and rescue (USAR) are not well understood. To this end, we present a set of experiments designed to test the limits of a vine robot system, the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT), operating in an engineered collapsed structure. Our testing is driven by a taxonomy of difficulty derived from the challenges USAR crews face navigating void spaces and their associated hazards. Initial experiments explore the viability of the vine robot form factor, both ideal and implemented, as well as the control and sensorization of the system. A secondary set of experiments applies domain-specific design improvements to increase the portability and reliability of the system. SPROUT can grow through tight apertures, around corners, and into void spaces, but requires additional development in sensorization to improve control and situational awareness.