Integrated smart robot with earthquake early warning system for automated inspection and emergency response

Earthquakes as a natural hazard have caused substantial economic losses and human life loss in many countries. Taiwan, which is located on the western Circum-Pacific seismic belt, encountered this problem in the form of the Meishan, Hsinchu-Taichung, and Chi-Chi earthquakes a few years ago. In this paper, the researchers propose a novel robot-event integrated system capable of doing the automated inspection and emergency response due to a significant earthquake. As the household’s earthquake warning receiving device picks up an alert, its built-in wireless communications system will send a signal to the robot. The robot will then commence the inspection of the indoor area via real-time image recognition and tracking. Upon detecting fallen people, it will approach them, regulating their movements via the robot operating system monitoring interface. The robot is designed to operate in a house that remains standing with acceptable damage in which the furniture might be falling and injure the occupants after an earthquake hit. The indoor experiment was conducted to verify the robot system and operation with a designed condition such as fallen and non-fallen people as the detected object. The precision of the robot arm was tested in the case of the delivery of supplies to the fallen people while waiting for the rescuers to arrive. The tests indicated that the proposed smart robot has prospective implementation in real-world applications with more research and development. The smart robot integrated with an earthquake early warning system is a promising approach to the temporary care of people affected by earthquakes.