Abstract

Natural phenomena having catastrophic consequences for people and infrastructure occur every year. Thus, the swift rescue of people is a crucial issue, and the rapid detection of humans trapped in a building can reduce the number of lost lives. Nowadays the use of robots to explore dangerous and inaccessible areas is increasingly common. In such areas, many sensors and actuators are deployed using diverse means to find and rescue people. This paper presents a robotic platform and a set of sensors for exploring an inaccessible area inside a simulated disaster environment. The platform is implemented using the open-source, low-cost Arduino hardware development board. We propose to use information related to carbon dioxide (CO2 ) concentrations as a estimate of human breath activity, which, in turn, is used to infer people’s occupancy. Also, we included a contactless thermometer sensor to locate people based on body temperature in order to improve its people detection sensibility. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.