Development of the balloon-cable driven robot for information collection from sky and proposal of the search strategy at a major disaster

At large-scale urban earthquake disaster, the human search and the information collection are the most important process of rescue activities. This research develops the balloon-cable driven robot for information acquisition from sky at crushed structures at landslide caused by huge earthquake. The balloon, which hangs up several sensors (Sensor Unit, SU), uses "a natural shape balloon". Three cables are connected with SU, and the balloon with sensors is driven by expansion and contraction of the cables length. Moreover, we propose the human search system by electromagnetic waves. Recently, a lot of people have cellphones or mobile devices. Our proposing search system is the position of a human body using this robot with the electromagnetic waves coming direction finder (ESPAR antenna). This paper describes the usefulness of the human body searching strategy by several experimental results.