Abstract:
In recent years, occurrence of all kinds of disasters has aroused wide scale attention to security of human society. Along with advances in technology, robots have found wide applications in the field of rescue. Over the past decade, different kinds of rescue robots have been developed, which mainly fall into three categories, namely crawler rescue robots, deformable (polymorphic) rescue robots and bionic rescue robots. The three types of robots have their respective advantages and disadvantages. They can be applied to different post-disaster environments.
In this thesis, the main idea was to design a structure for the rescue robot, enabling it to work according to different post-disaster environments. The structural design allows the rescue robot to change its body size based on different sizes of the environmental space after a disaster so that the rescue robot could work in different sizes of environmental space. The design put forward in this thesis is an advanced version of Hoberman Sphere. Hoberman Sphere is an isolinetic structure which can expand and compress to varied sizes. In view of the structure of Hoberman, SolidWorks was employed to design a compressible and expandable structure to implement rescue tasks within a narrow space. In order to verify the feasibility of this design, the model was printed by 3D technology. A connection problem was observed with the model after being assembled and printed. Then, the model was further modified. Next, deformation and strain on this design under the stress were tested. ANSYS was adopted and used for the finite element analysis of the transient structure. The analysis results suggests that the deformation suffered by the external structure was the minimum, while the deformation within was more significant, but non rupture or deviation was found.
