RubbleRescue

Inspiration

Disasters don't wait. Every year, rescue workers risk their lives entering collapsed buildings, gas-filled tunnels, and burning structures — often blind, with no idea what lies ahead. We kept asking ourselves: what if you could send something in first?

Snakes navigate impossible terrain — rubble, pipes, tight gaps — that no wheeled or legged robot can handle. That biological insight became our blueprint. We wanted to build a robot that could slither into danger so humans don't have to.

What it does

RubbleRescue is a cable-actuated snake robot built for disaster reconnaissance. It:

• Slithers through tight spaces and rubble using sinusoidal servo-driven motion
• Detects hazards in real time — smoke, flame, temperature, and humidity at the robot's tip
• Streams live video via a Logitech camera so the operator can see exactly what the robot sees
• Alerts the operator instantly when gas, flame, or obstacle thresholds are crossed — printed live to the Serial Monitor
• Is controlled via WASD keys sent over Serial — simple, fast, no extra software needed

The operator stays safe while RubbleRescue navigates the environment, detects gas leaks, spots fires, and streams live footage — all from a laptop.

How we built it

We split the robot into two control layers:

• Arduino Uno Q (Qualcomm chip) — runs the main logic, reads all sensors, receives WASD movement commands over Serial, and outputs live telemetry
• ESP32 — dedicated servo motor controller, handles the cable-actuation for smooth snake gait

Sensors at the tip:

• MQ-2 smoke/gas sensor
• Flame detector
• Temperature & humidity sensor

Video: Logitech camera mounted at the snake's head, plugged into the operator's laptop for a live first-person view of wherever the robot goes

Control: WASD commands sent via Serial Monitor — W (forward), A (left), S (back), D (right). Sensor readings print live alongside movement so the operator has full situational awareness

Body: 3D printed modular snake segments — designed and printed during the hackathon itself

Challenges we ran into

• Arduino Uno Q is brand new hardware — documentation is sparse and the board uses ADB (Android Debug Bridge) instead of standard serial for flashing, which took significant time to configure on Windows
• Pin conflicts — the Uno Q's WiFi stack affects certain analog pins, requiring careful pin mapping for sensors
• Cable actuation mechanics — getting smooth sinusoidal motion from SG90 servos through flexible cable routing inside 3D printed segments required several physical iterations
• Serial Monitor issues — the Uno Q requires Arduino_RouterBridge.h for Serial output, a non-obvious requirement that caused compilation failures until we tracked it down
• Sensor warmup — MQ-2 gas sensors need 30–60 seconds of warmup before giving reliable readings, which we had to account for in the demo startup sequence

Accomplishments that we are proud of

• Successfully 3D printed and assembled a functional snake body during the hackathon
• Got the Arduino Uno Q — a very new, poorly documented board — fully working with sensors and servo control in one unified firmware
• Achieved genuine snake-like lateral undulation using phase-offset sinusoidal servo motion
• Live Logitech camera feed combined with real-time Serial sensor data gives a full operator picture with zero extra software
• End-to-end demo works: drive the robot, trigger the gas sensor, trigger the flame sensor, watch alerts fire live in Serial Monitor

What we learned

• How to work with brand new, underdocumented hardware under time pressure — debugging the toolchain is sometimes harder than building the actual product
• How cable-actuated mechanisms translate rotational servo motion into flexible body movement
• How to architect a dual-microcontroller system (Uno Q + ESP32) where each board handles what it does best
• That analog sensor placement and power isolation matter enormously — floating grounds and ADC conflicts can silently corrupt readings
• Keeping the control interface simple (Serial + camera) actually makes for a more reliable and demo-friendly system than a complex web stack

What's next for RubbleRescue

• Web dashboard — move from Serial Monitor to a browser-based UI with live sensor gauges and visual alerts
• Autonomy — ultrasonic-based obstacle detection so the snake can navigate semi-autonomously
• Longer body — more printed segments for greater reach into rubble
• Two-way audio — mic on the robot + speaker on laptop so operators can communicate with survivors
• Mapping — fuse sensor data with movement to build a heatmap of hazard zones
• Waterproofing — make it deployable in flood scenarios

Built With

• 3d-printing-(pla)
• arduino
• arduino-uno-q
• c++
• cable-actuation-mechanism
• dht22-temperature-&-humidity-sensor
• esp32
• flame-sensor
• html
• javascript
• logitech-camera
• mq-2-gas-sensor
• serial
• sg90-servo-motors
• websocket