Kyoto University demonstrated on Tuesday a competition-winning rescue robot that can find and rescue people from buildings during a disaster.

The robot Fuhga -- around 25 centimeters tall and some 60 cm wide -- is equipped with two caterpillar legs and a long arm installed on the center of its body with a clutcher-type instrument attached at its end that can grab hold of people.

The robot developed by a research laboratory led by Fumitoshi Matsuno, a professor at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Engineering, took top spot in national rescue robot competition Robo Cup Japan Open 2017 earlier in the month.

Matsuno began robot research after he lost a student during the Great Hanshin Earthquake that devastated the western Japan port city of Kobe in January 1995. He now wants to contribute to the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant which was crippled after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

"From now, I want to cultivate technology that can help in decommissioning reactors in Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.'s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex," he said.

The lab had developed another robot that was used to assess the level of damage inside a building hit by the 2011 disaster.