Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life
Vol. 8(2); September (2021), pp. 90–93
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.k.210713.004; ISSN 2405-9021; eISSN 2352-6386
https://www.atlantis-press.com/journals/jrnal

Research Article

Junior High School Rescue Robot Challenge using Shock
Sensitive Tiny Dummy Robot
Kazuo Kawada*, Keisuke Iuchi, Keita Murai, Hiroyuki Y. Suzuki
Graduate School of Humanities Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, 1-1-1 Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima 739-8524, Japan

ARTICLE INFOABSTRACTArticle History

The Junior High School Rescue Robot Challenge is an annual activity held by Hiroshima University with the sponsorship of aconstruction machinery company. Its 2020 theme was to convey injured people “tenderly” from the top of a half-demolishedbuilding to ground. We developed shock sensitive tiny dummy robot, controlled by M5Stack microcomputer since it riggedwith accelerometer. The remote (wired) controlled robots developed by junior high school students conveyed the dummy andevaluated their performances including “tenderness” of the robots using the dummy.

Received 06 December 2020
Accepted 03 May 2021
Keywords
Rescue dummy
robot evaluation
technology education
Junior High SchoolICT© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press International B.V.
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

1. INTRODUCTION
Robot contest is an attractive activity for both students and instructors in junior high school technology education. Planning, processing, assembling and manipulating robots themselves make students
foster a great deal of ingenuity and creativity. Such experiences canincrease interest in today’s science and technology developments.
Several robot contests have been held in Japan [1–3], which aresaid to have been successful in fostering the capacities of invention, logical thinking and creativity in young participants. Those
activities, on the other hand, focused on “winning or losing of agame” for the evaluation of the robots. The introduction of competition is a good way to arouse incentive in participants’ minds, but
it also has the side effect of narrowing the view on the subject. Any
robot contains complexity, regardless of the level of the product;
they are not machines with a single function, and it is thus necessary to treat them as systems. Therefore, their evaluation must
be systematic. In other words, it must be done from various viewpoints. It is worth remembering that the guideline for junior highschool technology education (stated by the Ministry of Education,Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) also claims that we must
deal with humanities in the context of the development of technologies. Manufacturing education must also include humanity
development education; we must expect not only robots with highperformance but also robots that can consider and cooperate withothers.
In this context, we abandoned the word “contest” from our robot
activity and chose “challenge” as an alternative. The faculty ofCorresponding author. Email: kawada@hiroshima-u.ac.jp*Education at Hiroshima University held the “Rescue RobotChallenge” in 2014 for junior high school students [4]. It had formerly been named “Rescue Robot Contest” and had been held
since 2003 with the aim of deepening their understanding of social
issues and the relationship between people and robots through thecreation of robots with an awareness of human tenderness [5].
The basic theme of our “challenge” is human rescue from disastrous
conditions. Japan is known to be an earthquake-prone country; forinstance, in recent years, it has faced the Kumamoto Earthquake
in 2016, the Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake in 2018, among
others. It is therefore natural to desire a rescue robot. In this paper,
we describe the theme, results, and evaluation points of the “challenge” held in 2020. In particular, we have developed a new dummy
to evaluate the tenderness. The previously developed dummy
equipped tilt sensor which could just switch on when the tilting
angle exceeded a given value. The data from the tilt sensor was notjust a ON/OFF value, was sufficient to evaluate exactly magnitudeof the shocks. The current dummy, on the other hand, equipped
acceleration sensors which could evaluate quantitively the magnitude of vibration, so that we could utilize the data for evaluation of
the tenderness of the rescue robots.

2. CHALLENGE THEME IN 2020
From the era of the “contest,” our activity has used the theme of“quickly rescuing a dummy doll (of 1/8 of real human) from a simulated earthquake site and transport it to a safety zone.” The time ofrescue has been evaluated as basic data; however, ideas for rescuing
methods and humanitarian standpoints have also been evaluated-in
particular, by focusing on the “tenderness” of the robots to the doll
during evacuation.

K. Kawada et al. / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 8(2) 90–93

In 2020, we developed a small shock-sensitive dummy robot. The
dummy was placed on remote (wired) controlled robots developedby middle school students, and it checks how many shocks and/or vibrations are given during evacuation. The dummy was placed
horizontally on rescue robots. There were no wired nor remotecontrollers. The dummy could automatically accumulate the data
in it during rescue trials.

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M5Stack (Figure 3) as the controller because it was equippedwith accelerometers. The gross weight of the dummy was 81 g.

Figure 1 shows the rescue field used in 2020. The robots, along withthe dummies, are set in the starting area on the roof of the halfdemolished building. Then, the robots start to rescue dummies
passing through Zones A–C. They can choose different routes inZone B: (i) stairs, (ii) a gap with vertical walls and (iii) a steep slope.
There are obstacles on the ground (Zone C). The robots finallyarrive at the safety zone.

We set the thresholds of the accelerometer to ±1.5 g (m/s2) in theX- and Y-directions. We just took data on X and Y axes vibrations
for simplicity. We did not take data on rolling or pitching. It wasscarcely happened vibrations just on Z-axis during rescue operations. Most of the vibrations were combined with three X-, Y- andZ-axes. A pure Z-axis movement observed in the rescue operation
was merely fell down of the robot from building and it was easy
to be noticed by the judge. When the dummy has two acceleration of threshold or more, the liquid crystal display of the M5Stackturned red and emitted with a warning sound. Introduction of thedummy equipped with an accelerometer made possible to evaluate
the degree of tenderness of the robot toward the dummy.

A team consists of 2–5 members of junior high school students.
Every team first gave a 4-min presentation using a screen showing
the characteristics of the robot that they had developed, followed bya 3-min rescue activity using a real field.

4. RESULT OF “CHALLENGE”
AND EVALUATION

3. DEVELOPMENT OF RESCUE DUMMY
For simplicity, we used a small tapper box (83 mm in length,83 mm in width, and 45 mm in height) as the dummy’s body(Figure 2), although there were no protrusions representing
the legs, arms, or head. We chose a microcomputer module ofThe 6th Rescue Robot Challenge in 2020 was held on February 16,2020 (still in the 2019 fiscal year). A total of 11 teams participatedin the study. The points obtained are summarized in Table 1. The
performances of the robots were evaluated from two viewpoints,(i) goal points and (ii) tenderness points. The maximum points ofeach viewpoint were 20, and that the maximum total points were
40. For the goal points, if the robot delivered the dummy to thesafety zone in 3 min without dropping it, it received 20 points.
The goal points decrease according to the degree of problems thatoccurred during the rescue activity.
For the tenderness points, 20 points were given if no warning soundwas made, 15 points for one to three warnings, 10 points for fourto six warnings, five points for seven to nine warnings, and zero
points if warnings were more than 10.

Figure 1 | Rescue field.

Figure 2 | Rescue dummy with M5STACK.

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Figure 3 | M5Stack with accelerometer.
Table 1 | Goal points and tenderness points for each rescue robot
Rescue robot

ABCDEFGHIJKGoal points
Tenderness points
Total points

020
200151520
52502020020
20000202040201535

201535020
2002020

Let us consider an example. Rescue robot C is shown in Figure 4.
Robot C succeeded in transporting the dummy to the safety zone
without dropping it, and it achieved a goal point of 20. On the otherhand, Robot C gave 14–19 shocks to the dummy; therefore, the tenderness points decreased significantly. This robot used magnets toslowly descend the steel slope in Zone B. The trials were successful in practice; however, unfortunately, the magnet fell off from thesteel slope in the final performance, resulting in a large shock tothe dummy.
In contrast, rescue Robot G (Figure 5) could transport the dummywithout giving shocks. This robot used a pantograph mechanism todescend between the gaps of the two walls in Zone B.
Another interesting idea was found in Robot H (Figure 6). It usedcrawlers to travel the stairs in Zone B, which resulted in a speedytransportation of the dummy to the goal. Although it gave several
shocks to the dummy, the number and degree of the shocks weremuch lower than those of other robots that chose the stairs in Zone B.
Long arms had been ingeniously attached to its front and back, bywhich the robot could prevent staggering.

Figure 4 | Rescue robot C.

5. DISCUSSION
The 11 rescue robots can be classified according to the descending
rout in Zone B. Type 1 robot chose the gap between the two walls.
Six robots (A, B, E, G, I, and J) chose this method. Type 2, fourrobots D, F, H, and K chose the stairs. Only Robot C was classified
as Type 3 and descended a steel slope using a magnet, as explainedin the previous section.
The average goal points of Type 1–3 were 6.67, 5, and 20 points,
respectively, indicating that Type 3 had higher manipulability
during transportation in Zone B. On the other hand, the meantenderness points for Types 1–3 were 18.33, 13.75, and 5 points,respectively. A comparison of the points made clear that the robotsof Type 1 had higher stability during transportation in Zone B.

Figure 5 | Rescue robot G.

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evaluation factors can improve the accuracy of their performance
evaluation.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Figure 6 | Rescue robot H.

The Junior High School Rescue Robot Challenge is carried out by
co-sponsorship of Kobelco Construction Machinery Co., Ltd., andHiroshima University. We gratefully acknowledge the support for
execution of the Challenge by Kobelco Construction MachineryCo., Ltd.

Nonetheless, there were no considerable differences in the averagesof the total points between Type 1– 3, which were 25, 18.75, and25 points, respectively. These results may indicate a shortcomingof evaluation from a single factor. As mentioned before, the robots
essentially contain “complexity” in their design, mechanism,
manipulating manner, and so on; therefore, their performances
must also be evaluated from various aspects.

REFERENCES

6. CONCLUSION[4]

We developed a dummy robot for “Rescue Robot Challenge in2020.” The dummy variable was sensitive to shocks during rescue
transportation. The introduction of a shock-sensible dummy
made possible to quantitatively evaluate the “tenderness” of therobots developed by the junior high school teams, and adding

[5]

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approach to 1st rescue robot challenge for junior high-school
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K. Kawada, M. Nagamatsu, T. Yamamoto, A practice of rescue
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AUTHORS INTRODUCTION
Dr. Kazuo Kawada

Mr. Keisuke Iuchi
He received his PhD degree at Graduate
School of Education in Hiroshima
University. He is an Associate Professor
in the Graduate School of Humanities andSocial Sciences, Hiroshima University.

Mr. Keita Murai

He received his B.Ed. degree in Educationin 2019 from the Faculty of Education,Hiroshima University. He is acquiring
the M.Ed. in the Graduate School ofHumanities and Social Sciences,
Hiroshima University.

Dr. Hiroyuki Y. Suzuki
He received his B.Ed. degree in Educationin 2020 from the Faculty of Education,
Hiroshima University. He is acquiring the M.Ed. in the Graduate Schoolof Humanities and Social Sciences,
Hiroshima University.

He received his Doctor of Engineering
degree at Graduate School of Engineeringin Hiroshima University. He is anAssociate Professor in the Graduate
School of Humanities and Social Sciences,Hiroshima University.