Technology

Technology

We develop all the technologies our robots need. Both hardware and software are built in-house, and we keep building up our know-how as we go.

Hardware

Design with 3D CAD

Our robots are designed in 3D CAD. We build a 3D model of each robot and use it for virtual assembly and simple simulations.
3D CAD model of a crawler robot

Hardware

Fabrication and Assembly

Carbon plates and stainless-steel parts are made for us by outside companies. Our workshop also has a drill press, a lathe, 3D printers and a CNC machine, so we make parts ourselves as well.
A member assembling a robot in the workshop

Software

Software

  • 3D point cloud shown in RViz
    • ROS 2

    Control with ROS 2

    Our robots run on the ROS 2 robotics middleware. Everything from multi-camera video and audio links for remote operation beyond line of sight to motor control and inverse kinematics for the arm is developed quickly with ROS 2.

  • Hazmat label recognised by YOLO
    • YOLO
    • Vision

    Object Recognition with YOLO

    The onboard 2D camera can recognise any object with YOLO. In the RoboCup Rescue Robot League, robots must correctly identify hazmat labels and report the results automatically.

  • 2D map built with SLAM
    • SLAM
    • 3D LiDAR

    SLAM with LiDAR

    With the onboard 3D LiDAR the robot performs SLAM and can build both 2D and 3D maps, including marking detected objects on the map.

Knowledge Sharing

Sharing Our Know-how

We actively share what we learn about software: our code is on GitHub and our ROS 2 articles (in Japanese) are on Zenn. We hope to contribute not only to our own team but to the whole rescue robot competition community.

GitHubZenn (team wiki)
Our technical articles on Zenn