2023 – TDP – NuBot-Rescue – RoboCupRescue – Robot

Rescue robots are important for urban search and rescue. When disaster strikes, search and rescue robots minimize the risk of secondary damage while enabling human rescuers to quickly locate and extricate victims. Our team designs the NuBot rescue robot, including its mechanical structure, electronic architecture, and software system. Benefiting from the strong mechanical structure, our rescue robot has good mobility. It is durable and will not be trapped facing highly cluttered and unstructured terrains during urban searching and rescuing. We build the electronic architecture of our robot under industry standards, which can bear electromagnetic interferences and physical impacts from the intensive tasks. We develop the soft- ware system upon the Robot Operating System (ROS), using both self-developed programs and several basic open-source packages provided by the ROS community. We develop a complete software system for robotic rescuing, including localization, mapping, exploration, object recognition, etc. Our robot system has been successfully applied and tested in the RoboCup Rescue Robot League (RRL) competitions. Most recently, we won the Best in Class of Exploration and Mapping in the 2021, 2022 RoboCup RRL, and Search and Inspect in 2022 RoboCup RRL. We achieved the top 5 performance in the previous competitions and won the Best in Class small robot mobility in 2016 RoboCup RRL Leipzig Germany. Our team has also won the championships of RoboCup China Open RRL competitions since 2015. In this year, we equip a new-style LiDAR to obtain dense point clouds and reduce the dead zone of perception. We also propose a novel point cloud registration algorithm to achieve precise and robust simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).