Athena

Model: athena

Athena is an open-hardware tracked rescue robot from the SIM Group at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The research platform combines a whole-body crawler chassis with four independently reconfigurable flippers, a central 7-DoF manipulator, LiDAR and camera-based environment perception, and a custom remote emergency-stop system. The team designed Athena for rough-terrain search-and-rescue research: it has demonstrated 41 cm step traversal, 45-degree stair climbing, valve and button manipulation, and payload handling up to 7.2 kg close to the base or 2.9 kg at full 1.54 m reach. CAD, PCB, and low-level software files are public for research reference, but the robot is a prototype rather than a commercial product.