New Zealand: what can robots do for a tsunami and quake?

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Kiwis and especially to our colleagues at the New Zealand Fire Service who have been diligently adopting robotics.

So when a tsunami strikes, what can robots do? As was shown at the 3/11 Japan tsunami, unmanned marine vehicles can accelerate economic recovery by inspecting critical underwater infrastructure

[youtube]https://youtu.be/If9BgRRk2bk[/youtube] As was shown by our Japan-US deployments at the invitation of two municipalities at the 3/11 Japan tsunami, unmanned marine vehicles  (UMV) can assist with the response and accelerate economic recovery by inspecting critical underwater infrastructure- the underwater portions of bridges, ports, and shipping channels that are vital for access by responders and for getting supplies to any cut off populations. Later, the UMVs can help with environmental remediation, finding fishing boats and cars leaking gas and oil into pristine fishing waters and identifying other sources of pollution or dangers to fishing and navigation.

UAVs could be used to assess the overall boundaries of the incident, though most of the damage is near the ground. Like flooding, this is hard to get the angles to accurately assess damage. In places such as New Zealand, the agencies (and news media) generally have enough resources to get a general aerial assessment.

 

Dufek wins Best Field Paper Award at IEEE SSRR!

Left to right: Jan Dufek, Dr. Auke Ijspert, Dr. Kamilo Melo
Left to right: Jan Dufek, Dr. Auke Ijspert, Dr. Kamilo Melo

I am proud to announce that Jan Dufek’s paper on using a small tethered Fotokite UAV to control the EMILY unmanned marine surface vehicle to rescue drowning immigrants won the best field paper award at the IEEE International Symposium on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics in Lausanne, Switzerland, last week. Jan is one of my Ph.D. students.  The paper was the preliminary work over the spring semester that is now funded by the National Science Foundation RAPID program.

Jan received 200 Euros

Jan received 200 Euros and his paper will be published as a journal article in Frontiers, a European conference.

More details about the conference are at http://ssrrobotics.org, but there were over 100 attendees from 17 countries. IEEE SSRR is the only conference dedicated

More details about the conference are at http://ssrrobotics.org, but there were over 100 attendees from 17 countries. IEEE SSRR is the only conference dedicated to robots for  homeland security and humanitarian operations. It was established in 2002, with Dr. Howie Choset (CMU) and myself as founding co-chairs.

It was pretty dark so the photo is poor. Jan is on the left with conference chairs Dr. Auke Ijspeert and Dr. Kamilo Melo.