Abstract

Ground, aerial, and marine robots are increasingly used by responders to save lives, mitigate ongoing threats, and accelerate economic recovery. The recent Surfside condo collapse and Hurricane Ian are two examples of the extreme environments that robots, and their operators, must function in. Clearly, rescue robots have great societal benefit; however our work at these two disasters illustrate why disaster robotics is important to robotics research in general. One reason is that research in the field at a disaster informs the virtuous research cycle, guiding both fundamental and convergent research. The use of robots at a disaster provides a “canary in the coal mine” indication of gaps in hardware, software, and human-robot interaction that might take years to discover through hypothesis-driven laboratory testing. The use of drones at the Surfside collapse has led to fundamental research in reconstructing voids using photogrammetry.  Hurricane Ian showed that drone pilots by the end of the second day of the response were showing fatigue and cognitive deficits equivalent to being legally drunk in most states. Surprisingly, the fatigue did not lead to aviation errors, possibly because of the robustness and automation of the drones being used, but squads made significant errors in collecting the imagery needed by incident command. Hurricane Ian has produced advances in computer vision and machine learning, including new schemas for coding, identifying alignment errors, and producing a massive labeled open-source dataset. A second reason why disaster robotics is valuable is that it, by necessity, is pioneering domain-inspired, interdisciplinary synthesis, which in turns calls for new pedagogical approaches for educating the next generation of scientists.

Bio

Dr. Robin R. Murphy, Ph.D. (’92) and M.S. (‘89) in computer science and B.M.E. (‘80) from the Georgia Institute of Technology,  is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and a director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-robot interaction for emergency management. She is an AAAS, ACM, and IEEE Fellow, a TED speaker, and author of over 400 papers and four books including the award-winning Disaster Robotics which captures much of her research deploying ground, aerial, and marine robots to over 30 disasters in five countries including the 9/11 World Trade Center, Fukushima, Hurricane Harvey, and the Surfside collapse. Her contributions to robotics have been recognized with the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions and a US Air Force Exemplary Civilian Service Award medal.  Dr. Murphy has served on numerous professional and government boards, including the Defense Science Board and National Science Foundation, as well as the AI for the Benefit of Humanity prize committee.