“Celebrating ‘Bots During National Robotics Week” covers AUVSI Day on Capitol Hill and Dr. Murphy’s invited address.
Archive for the ‘In the News’ Category
CRASAR participation in National Robotics Week in Unmanned Systems vol 28, no 6, Jun 2010
Posted by Dr. Robin Murphy on July 27th, 2010 at 5:54 pm CDT
Robots in Discover Magazine May Issue
Posted by Dr. Robin Murphy on April 16th, 2010 at 4:06 am CDT
The May 2010 issue of Discover Magazine features CRASAR director Robin Murphy as one of four roboticists interviewed in “Machine Dreams.” Online interviews appear as part of the DISCOVER/NSF Grand Challenges in Science: Robotics event.
Qinghai Quake and robots
Posted by Dr. Robin Murphy on April 14th, 2010 at 9:15 am CDT
What is it with disasters? They’re coming fast and furious. Here’s the 411 on robots at the China quake.
The Qinghai quake is the latest of the series of tragedies. Prof. Bin Li at the Shenyang Institute of Automation and an active member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Safety Security Rescue Robots, contacted the Chinese national earthquake response service this morning. It doesn’t look like ground robots are appropriate– the structures are mostly small and constructed from brick and mud. That type of construction is problematic– the brick and mud turns to a liquidized dust, acting like water to fill all the voids and displaces air. Even if there are voids, the suspended dust causes respiratory distress. Eric Rasmussen InSTEDD has many tales to tell of the similar Turkey earthquake.
China, by the way, does have at least one rescue robot. Bin tells me it was deployed to the mine collapse but could not be used because it wasn’t waterproof. (A gentle aside to manufacturers: d’uh!)
Aerial vehicles might be helpful for tactical operations and I can’t help thinking that an unmanned marine vehicle with an acoustic camera capable of penetrating turbid waters could provide more information about that crack in the big dam…
Bin was a participant in the NSF-JST-NIST workshop at Disaster City at the first of the month and we look forward to working with him and his group. In the meantime.. I’m speaking tomorrow at AUVSI day at the Capitol– I hope that in the future we can do more than offer our prayers.
Robin
Living with Robots screened at Sundance
Posted by Dr. Robin Murphy on January 25th, 2010 at 8:44 am CST
Honda’s short-film documentary, Living with Robots, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan 22, 2010. Rescue robot footage from CRASAR and director Robin Murphy appear throughout the documentary.
Summer Institutes and being an Alpha Geek
Posted by Dr. Robin Murphy on June 23rd, 2009 at 7:15 pm CDT
While it’s been longer than I realized since my last post. Part of the delay was the usual end of the semester scrambling, but also much more exciting event our first mini Summer Institute On emergency informatics at Disaster City. A Summer Institute as created by David Woods at Ohio State is and amazing innovation workshop, where the various stakeholders in a system — in this case academics responders, agencies, and industry, give together to learn each other’s language, conduct hands-on missions, and participate in envisioning exercises. We had 35 participants from TEES, TEEX, and our academic and industry partners. Faculty from 5 engineering departments (CE, CSE, ECE, ME, and ENTC) plus Architecture participated along with Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, and TAMU Corpus Christi. TCAT led the industry affiliates program discussion- attended by 4 industries (Lockheed Martin, AirRobot, SA Technologies, and Velodyne), and the US Army Research Lab. One major outcome was a model of information flow and structural inspection tasks– none of this had any idea how much rescue, recovery and reentry hinges on the structural specialist, building inspectors, insurance adjusters, and contractors. Look for a publication with the model soon!
But the other big news is that Damon Tabor at WIRED did a short piece on us under the Alpha Geek heading. Click here to see. Nice job- he spent over a year on it, we had wanted him to embed with us but couldn’t work it out.
