Our project was to build a search and rescue robot that could explore one floor of a building and detect any people. This system would be used when a building needed to be evacuated and could have dangerous conditions, such as a gas leak. Using a robot to explore a floor of a hazardous building has the potential to better protect rescue workers, by allowing them to not enter the building if no one is inside. This could also be used to save time by searching the building while rescue workers are putting on necessary safety equipment. The goal of our robot is to autonomously navigate one floor of a building, and detect and notify rescue personnel of anyone in the building.
We used a mecanum chassis for our robot to allow for high maneuverability and effective obstacle avoidance. A Raspberry Pi 4B is used to run all of the computation on the robot, such as determining a shortest path to follow, with no input needed to control the robot. An IMU is used to provide acceleration data to the robot so the robot can know where it is on a map and follow the planned path. A Lidar scanner is used to measure distances to points and allow the robot to avoid obstacles. A webcam is used to record video, which the Pi uses to detect people and notify the rescue workers. At the outset of the project we had wanted to use SLAM (Simultaneously Localization and Mapping) so the robot could determine its location and a map of its surroundings entirely on its own, but we were not able to integrate our obstacle avoidance and path planning systems in time, so we rely on a pre-loaded map for navigation.