Senior Project: Rescue Robot

Hello! My name is Davis Diercks, and I am building a DC-motor-powered, spherical robot, which will hopefully serve as a new type of emergency response equipment. I currently have a team of four people including myself, all of us from different schools. Tyler Bortel is a junior at the Bay School of San Francisco, and he specializes in raw math and physics as well as general facts and knowledge. Avery Helms is a homeschooled senior, and he is a great all-rounder, contributing to design ideas, practicality, construction, and more. Geneva Bedell is a senior at the Marin School, and she will be contributing to a lot of the construction and providing one of our work locations, as well as adding spirit to the team with her enthusiastic and encouraging personality! I, then, am a senior at Novato High, and I am the team's leader and CAD specialist. I'll be doing most of the designing of the robot, as well as a lot of construction and providing a primary work location. In addition to doing this for the fun of building a robot and potentially changing the game of rescuing victims of disasters, I’ve chosen to do this as my Senior Project for school.

The robot will have an unprecedented form of mobility: From the outside, it’ll look like nothing more than a giant metal soccer ball, but on the inside, each panel will have an individually addressable linear actuator behind it. An on-board microcontroller and IMU component (Inertial Measurement Unit: a gyroscopic sensor/accelerometer) will calculate the robot’s orientation, and figure out the correct sequence of panel actuation to move the robot in the desired direction. With this new mobility, it’ll be able to traverse all sorts of terrain that traditional wheeled bots might have trouble with, but it’ll still have the durability, protection, strength, and speed that a legged robot typically lacks.

Once it arrives at the scene, its main purpose will actually be informative rather than physical. The only physical help it could give is possibly providing a first aid kit and/or a light source, or breaking down doors and going through rubble. However, the robot will be equipped with a speaker, a directionally sensitive microphone array, and a GPS unit. Upon entering a scene, it will roam around, asking for anyone there to yell out, and creating a virtual map of where it’s been. It will use the array of microphones to determine the direction of the person, distinguishing his or her voice with some simple frequency detection, and then ask a series of questions regarding the person’s abilities and health, starting with asking whether the person can understand it (for language purposes), and then if he or she is able to follow it to the exit. In an ideal situation, they would respond “yes” and “yes,” and the robot would lead them out through the map it created on the way there.

According to our materials estimate, we will need to raise just $3,000 in order to purchase everything we need to build the complete robot and a remote control, which may be in the form of a mobile device application. We'll need a variety of materials for this, including 32 decent DC motors and linear actuators, a lot of sheet metal to make the robot itself (which will be 0.7m diameter), some microcontrollers and circuitry components, and much more. We're already behind schedule for building this, so we need this money ASAP! We need at least $2,000 by the end of February if possible, because we need to have a working robot by May 1.

I really need this to happen in order for my senior project to have any resulting tangible product, and if it works it could revolutionize the world of emergency rescue, saving countless lives. My team and I are very excited to build a robot and to rescue the previously unrescuable, but it just can’t happen if we don’t have funding to purchase materials, so providing us with a donation would truly make you not only our hero, but those whom this robot could save. I hope to hear from you soon!