Description

The Premise

Our EE 582 Project is called SARBot, which stands for Search and Rescue Robot.

The main premise behind our project, is that of robot that would search out avalanche victims. Currently, trapped victims can use something called avalanche beacons, which when turned on, emit a distinct signal that is able to be picked up over long ranges. When someone is stuck in an avalanche, the rescue team uses a receiver to pick up the beacon signal, and move towards the person for the rescue.

This can be quite painstaking and can be made even more difficult by bad weather encountered by the rescue team. Our idea is to try and speed the process up, and hopefully improve the chances of survival for avalanche victims. A robot is ideal for this situation, because (if designed right) it is immune to different weather and terrain conditions that would affect human rescuers. A SARBot would be able to locate the person quickly, transmit exact coordinates back to home-base, provide needed supplies to the victims, and perhaps even initiate the actual rescue process. For larger disasters, multiple SARBots could be deployed, with each one of them attempting to search and rescue a separate beacon. This increases the search efficiency greatly since multiple searches can happen in parallel, and when one search is complete, that SARBot could assist other robots (i.e. the SARBot has a priority list).

Our Project

For our project, we will not be attempting to design a fully functional SARBot. Instead, we will simulate rescue situations, and try to build something that solves the main problems encountered in them.

There are three fundamental problems a real SARBot has to deal with:

• Locate the beacon and move towards it
• Do not run into obstacles
• Perform some action (or a complex set of actions) once the beacon has been reached

For our simplified simulation, our SARBot will:

• Locate the beacon and move towards it
• If the robot hits an object set off an alarm to indicate that it has found the beacon
• Possibly: Once it hits an object, determine if that object is the beacon. If it is not, then it is an obstacle, so move around it on the previous path.

There are also a number of extra responsibilities that SARBots have beyond these basic steps, and those are outlined as Future Goals on our Goals page (also visit there if you want some more detailed information on how we've separated out our project).