Conversations / Live Q&A

Robots don't replace people or dogs! Most ground robot scenarios go like this: the dog team gets a hit, it's confirmed, the Tech Specialist tries to see with a search camera (boroscope or camera mounted on a wand), if they can't tell from there, then depending on the void type, one of the shoe-box sized robots or 18 foot long "caterpillar" type of robot boroscope would be of use. So think of this as complementary, not competitive!

The USA leads in the deployment of all types of robots (land, sea, air) for search and rescue. Our Center has participated in the most disasters or incidents (13). Second place goes to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Right now, only one search team in the US owns a rescue robot- New Jersey Task Force 1. They have ground robots recently used at the Hackensack parking garage collapse. Most grants to responders won't cover the costs until NIST/ASTM completes standards for them- and then Congress will need to make money available for them the way they did for bomb squad robots.

As a result, groups that really need a robot borrow ours. (Hurt Locker robots are usually way too big for search and rescue)

To the best of my knowledge, no robots are being used. The most likely use would be an aerial vehicle- National Guards often get a Predator up in the air to get a quick overview of the extent, but Joplin had great (through very sad and distressing) footage from manned helis.

Ground robots are rarely of use in tornadoes because dogs can tell if a person is in there and homes collapses are rarely more than 20 feet deep-- and current technology can handle looking to those depths. Ground robots are more useful for commercial, engineered buildings- which typically withstand wind.

Aerial were and ground robots are in use at Fukushima. Some ground robots were used a bit in the tsunami, but marine (sea) vehicles are more useful. They can search underwater and also inspect critical infrastructure like bridges, pipelines, ports. I assisted  the UAV team at Fukushima and led one of the three  marine vehicle teams in Japan.

Marine vehicles were used in Haiti by the Army Corp of Engineers for port clearing, a UAV flew once in Haitian airspace, and Predators flew outside of Haitian airspace.

The rule of thumb is that small ground robot cost in increments of $50K. We have some shoe-box sized robots (Inuktun, American Standard) that run just over $50K. We borrow a caterpillar robot from the Japanese that is valued at $100k. Our larger HazMat bot is $150k.

Small aerial vehicles (bigger version of those ParrotDrones you see in the mall) run $50-100K.

Marine vehicles, having to be really and truly waterproof, and really specialized sonars, run in the hundreds of thousands.

We at CRASAR strongly believe that every search and rescue team should have portfolio of land, sea, and air robots to use- because time is critical. 1 hour is the timeframe for major life saving, responders need to  understand a massive situation and its nuances within 24 hours, and most of the life saving and rapid recovery work is done in the first 72 hours. Often we get called in too late to make a difference...

Actually this is of tremendous relevance! The real "win" in the Japan tsunami search and recovery is marine vehicles, particularly remotely operated vehicles (ROVs)- small, agile versions of the ones used in the BP Oil Spill. We took 4 of them to Japan and assisted there, working in collaboration with the International Rescue System Institute who lined up requests from different townships.

Think of all the bridges, ports, pipelines that are underwater! And the missing 10,000 people. Probably underwater. And all in shallow debris filled areas that the Japanese Coast Guard can't deploy manual divers. ROV and AUVs are incrediable tools- we've been pushing for them in response and recovery since Hurricane Wilma!

Great question! One of the things is that we hope to see robots in the field do the great things that they can already do in the lab! I know that sounds silly, but really there's a huge gap between what robots can do and what gets commercialized. So getting what exists now in terms of sensors, intelligence, mapping, computer vision onboard would be fanstastic.

In terms of what cool things people are working on now, I think victim management is a biggie-- what do you do with a survivor when you find them? (The Chilean miners were a special case, most victims in earthquakes take on the order of 4-10 hours to extricate- but still that's 4-10 hours...) We're working on a "survivor buddy" robot with Stanford under funding from NSF and Microsoft (thank you!!!)

Three of my favorites for ground robots are the small snake robot being developed by Howie Choset at CMU, the sandworm robot being developed by Dan Goldman at Georgia Tech which will be able to  "swim" through debris, and the Terminatorbot and pulsing tether being developed by Rich Voyles at Denver University.

I'd like to see a more "emergency informatics" approach, where all the data, all the robots and people and assets, everything is coordinated in a way that is very easy for decision makers.

Those types of robots are generally lab robots designed to help explore basic research in controls or artificial intelligence- they usually aren't designed to be "really" used, though they are incredibly useful for research. There's only a couple of universities in the USA that do field robotics, mostly CMU and Texas A&M.

Now, that said, that doesn't mean the Japanese aren't working on rescue robots and didn't have robots there. The sizable rescue robotics community got started in Japan in 1995 (Kobe Earthquake) and in the USA at the same time (due to Oklahoma City bombing). The International Rescue Systems Institute (IRS- yes, really, that's the abbreviation they use)  is a consortium of 7+ universities working on this problem, complementary to the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue here in the USA. IRS has been working on ground robots and did some deployments and will be going to help map Fukushima at the end of the month. They just aren't getting the press. Our ROV deployment was a joint IRS-CRASAR event, because we saw the need for ROVs after Hurricane Charley and spate of hurricanes. They didn't see as much need before the tsunami. It's hard to cover all of the needs in one center- that's why our two groups (as well as with groups in Europe) work together extensively!