Robin Murphy: These robots come to the rescue after a disaster
Robin Murphy researches robots -- ground, aerial and marine -- that can help out during disasters. Full bio
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each year in disasters.
will be permanently disabled or displaced,
20 to 30 years to recover
the initial response by one day,
can get in, save lives,
danger there is,
the roads, the electricity,
the insurance agents,
to rebuild the houses,
you can restore the economy,
and more resilient to the next disaster.
processed one day earlier,
their home repaired.
make a disaster go away faster.
a couple of these.
this rotorcraft, works.
can't get from binoculars on the ground
and insurance people who need this.
like this fixed-wing, this hawk.
for geospatial surveys.
pulling imagery together
up in Washington State,
understanding of the disaster --
had it under control
and mudslide might wipe them out
to the responders and property damage,
the future of salmon fishing
what was going on.
to the site, flying the UAVs,
to Arlington command post --
data that they could take
to get any other way --
population lives by water,
infrastructure is underwater --
like the bridges and things like that.
unmanned marine vehicles,
which is SARbot, a square dolphin.
by Hurricane Katrina in the United States.
your pipelines, your ports -- wiped out.
to get in enough relief supplies
at the Haiti earthquake.
from the SARbot
using her sonar, in four hours.
it was going to be six months
a manual team of divers in,
the divers two weeks.
the fall fishing season,
which is kind of like their Cape Cod.
I've shown you have been small,
don't do things that people do.
are particularly small,
at the World Trade Center
rappelling down, going deep in spaces.
from Bujold's viewpoint, look at this.
where you can't fit a person or a dog --
to a survivor way in the basement,
that are on fire.
the tracks began to melt and come off.
the experts, in new and innovative ways.
making the robots smaller, though.
the informatics,
the right data at the right time.
experts immediately access the robots
of driving to the site,
use their robots over the Internet.
train derailment in a rural county.
your chemical engineer,
that particular county happens to have?
without knowing what robot they're using,
what they give the experts, is data.
who gets what data when?
all the information to everybody
is it overwhelms the networks,
the cognitive abilities
that one nugget of information
that's going to make the difference.
about those kinds of challenges.
by just recording the data from Bujold
said they wanted.
would have loved,
the box beams, the serial numbers,
hospitals, city halls --
by different agencies
the data from the robots to share,
compress that sequence of phases
to do the response in parallel.
is a misnomer.
they may be underwater,
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Robin Murphy - Disaster roboticistRobin Murphy researches robots -- ground, aerial and marine -- that can help out during disasters.
Why you should listen
Robin Murphy imagines how robots can do tasks no human could amid scenes of disaster hard to imagine, from the World Trade Center disaster to Hurricane Katrina to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear emergency. In her recent book, Disaster Robotics, she lays out her research into the problem, which pulls together artificial intelligence, robotics and human-robot interaction.
At Texas A&M, Murphy is the director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and the Center for Emergency Informatics. She also co-founded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Technical Committee on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics and its annual conference. Her field work, combined with technology transfer and research community-building activities, led to her receiving the 2014 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics.
Robin Murphy | Speaker | TED.com