Post-Disaster Rescue Robot Swarm RescueSwarm Completes Earthquake Drill in Japan: Snake-Plus-Quadruped-Plus-Drone Trinity Search
Japans NIED and Sonys joint RescueSwarm post-disaster rescue robot swarm completes a large-scale earthquake drill. Snake robots enter rubble gaps, quadruped robots traverse debris, and drones mark survivor locations from above, achieving search efficiency 8 times that of human rescue teams.
Japans National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience and Sony jointly completed a large-scale drill of the RescueSwarm post-disaster rescue robot swarm in late October. The exercise took place at a training ground in Kobe simulating a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, deploying 20 robots of 3 types.
Snake robots, each 1.5 meters long and 3cm in diameter, enter rubble gaps to search for survivors, equipped with infrared thermal imagers and microphones. Quadruped robots based on the improved Sony AIBO platform traverse debris and sloped surfaces to deliver emergency supplies. Drones provide aerial views, marking survivor locations and mapping 3D rubble models.
In the simulated scenario, RescueSwarm completed a comprehensive search of 10,000 square meters of rubble in 2 hours, locating 15 simulated survivors. The same task would take human rescue teams approximately 16 hours. Japans Fire and Disaster Management Agency plans to equip fire departments in all major cities with RescueSwarm systems by 2029.
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