But now the question is how to keep the trapped miners comfortable and unstressed as they wait for extraction. The has been a topic of research that we are conducting with Prof. Cliff Nass at Stanford University, a world leader in how people communicate through media (such as computers or robots), since 2007. We call the project “Survivor Buddy” – building a robot multi-media “head” that wasn’t creepy. We were originally funded by Microsoft (thanks!) and since 2009 by the National Science Foundation (thanks, too!). The original version of Survivor Buddy was cited by Popular Science as a “Best of 2009″ and we have just completed a much lighter, more agile version seen in these YouTube clips here and here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ve requested permission to come to Chile and observe, now that things have settled down (they didn’t need MORE people on-site right after they found the miners). This is quite the opportunity to learn how trapped victims react… and perhaps some of the lessons Cliff and I and our great grad students (especially the newly graduated Dr. Victoria Groom) have learned can be of some help.

It’s great to hear that robots are being adopted and used!

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

Certainly the big surveillance UAVs such as the Predator and Global Hawk variants can give a “big picture” overview, but don’t forget that search and rescue is largely done by small teams working independently who need information “on demand”. They can’t tell you what they want until they get there. And if they don’t get within a few minutes, they move on. Small helicopter like UAVs can help them assess a collapsed building, see people trapped on the other side of a pile of rubble, and get the views they want. Small, shoe-box sized robots can drive into rubble deeper than a search camera or boroscope can go, finding voids that would be otherwise missed. And unmanned marine vehicles can determine if the substructure of bridges and sea walls is still intact and whether rubble and debris is being washed into the footings and will cause damage.

We’re standing by, hoping to help and hoping to learn. And hoping that one day responders all over the world will have these robots to use immediately.

It is always a difficult call for an incident commander to bring in new technology that they have not trained with or has been shown definitely to work. A disaster is just that—it’s usually a surprise and by definition exceeds resources. So the command structure is busy just trying to do the regular things of getting traditional resources to the right place. And people under stress fall back to the things they are most comfortable with. Consider too, the individual responders are too tired and stressed to take on out new equipment (more things to lug around) even if they are familiar with it.  That’s why for the first 4 years following 9/11, I gave nearly a hundred talks to response agencies and participated in many exercises so that we could show the responders what the robots could do and get their comfort level up. We created a 2-hour awareness course and a 10 hour introductory course that responders could get continuing ed credits for. The role of giving responders hands-on time with robots has largely been taken over by NIST and their rescue robot standards program.

And remember most new equipment has terrible interfaces and ergonomics, so it is a true pain to use.  This means bringing trained operators to use the equipment on behalf of the responders adds to the logistics footprint- here’s a couple more people that aren’t on the official roster and have to be accounted for.  And the tech operators may have no experience or response training- and there are basic procedures and terminology that you need to know. The liability and logistics is just hard. It is way easier for the incident commander to just to say “no.” CRASAR is all about the technicians getting response training so we won’t be a burden or a liability.

Also keep in mind that disasters always bring out people who are well-intentioned but have no clue whatsoever. I have some horror stories from the Crandall Canyon Utah mine disaster so I can definitely sympathize with the incident commanders.  The fire service typically just says “no” based on past experiences because they don’t have time to get distracted with such things—so if they didn’t know you and felt comfortable with you before a disaster, you aren’t likely to get your foot in the door. Trying to pressure them just makes it worse for the rest of us.  The robots used at 9/11 were invited by the NY State and City emergency departments through the connections of Lois Clark McCoy at NIUSR, but the responders viewed them warily and did not take us to the field. John Blitch led a small group that used the robots on the first day but the second day when you couldn’t get to the site without being part of a tasked assignment, we just sat there. A guy from a major government lab in a suit was wandering around the Javits Center where all the response teams were housed talking about how great the lab’s sensors were. (Back up- A guy in a suit. At a disaster site. That certainly undermined any credibility that these guys had ever stepped outside of their lab, much less did rigorous field testing. ) Then suddenly the FEMA teams started asking for us to come with them- primarily because Chief Ron Rodgers (bless him!) at Florida Task Force 3 posted to a responder chat room that my group had worked with him in the field and the students and I had completed basic response training. We became known quantities.

There’s also a matter of scale. The incident command team is responsible for doing the most good for the most people. Will a couple (or even a hundred) of experimental technologies really make a difference and be worth the disruption to the already stressful way of doing things and additional personnel and logistics burden? Or is a more rational decision to focus on doing the basics?  That’s the incident command teams call and I respect that.

The point is not whether CRASAR participates in a disaster  but rather whether we are getting closer to the day when the responders routinely take the robots and other technologies that they own and operate to the incident- that’s our mission.

I had the good fortune to attend the Robotics Rodeo at Ft. Hood last week- a rodeo of unmanned ground robotics hosted by U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Fort Hood III Corps (go Phantom Warriors!). A wonderful experience and many thanks to the CO Gen. Ricky Lynch (he has MS in robotics from MIT).

Some pictures are above and some thoughts about the commercialization of robotics…

According to a good friend, Bill Kearns, at the turn of the last century, there were over 200 car manufacturers in North America. (His family’s business was one of them.) Each manufacturer had something special, a starter motor, independent suspension, what have you. An amazing array of advances, some redundant, many brilliant.

But the problem was, they weren’t on the same car. Who wanted the latest, greatest engine on a car that you had to use with a hand crank?

Durant and Ford were credited with manufacturing but sometimes it is missed that they it wasn’t just that they mastered mass production, they mastered mass production of the right thing. They were among the first to view the cars as the sum of its parts. The superior technology of a component (usually invented by the owner) was not the reason for existence but rather a marketable feature of a desirable whole. As was stressed in one of my mechanical engineering courses, automobile companies are manufacturing companies, which make things for people to buy, not engineering companies, which create or investigate ideas for someone else to make into things for people to buy. Automotive companies at the turn of the century were really about engineering, not about the car. A similar pattern of scattered developments which were consolidated into systems happened in the aerospace industry.

The Robotics Rodeo reinforced my opinion that ground robotics is in the same state. Interesting pieces, some brilliant engineering, lots of duplication, and few useful systems.

One conclusion is that this is the Natural Order of Things and will sort itself out over time. This line of reasoning is: perhaps some duplication will result in lesser technologies occasionally trumping superior technologies and some dollars will be wasted. But this should be tolerated since the duplication and competition is usually efficient overall and reduces purchase prices, right? Besides, premature standards or regulations can kill off an emerging technology.

The Natural Order of Things philosophy has problems. In asymmetric warfare, do we have time or dare risk being beta-maxed by an adversary? And in days of trillion dollar deficits, will we be able to afford the cost of duplication? Remember, the government is subsidizing the UGV market (either through DoD or law enforcement) whereas automotive industry was private capital. There is no real consumer market for these devices. Is UGV development is in fact regulated by the invisible hand of capitalism or being de facto regulated by current defense acquisition processes. If so, is that a good or a bod thing? I don’t know…

I’m at the AUVSI North America conference– yesterday I gave two papers, one on the wildland firefighting descriptive analysis that we did with Lockheed Martin on the use of ground robots and one on our Rollover Pass, Texas, response. The wildland firefighting paper made the Flight Global Daily newsletter today (probably as the token application du jour that didn’t involve weaponization). I’m quoted giving a list of problems with UAVs for wildland firefighting- that was the list of problems from the focus group of subject matter experts.

There may be a killer UAV with my name on it… please, please, call them off. I love UAVs, honest!

The list of problems is based on what they’ve seen in UAVs to date, not what’s possible or what is even available. Sadly the disconnect between what exists and what the response community has access to remains depressingly high. Bob Roth and Tom Zajkowski with the Forestry Service are working hard, with Greg Walker’s group at Alaska and Brian Argrow’s team at Colorado combining research and fieldwork.

But the poor firefighters often only see and interact with vendors who come out of nowhere at a disaster and claim to have the best technology; while well-meaning, the technology is often a poor match because there is no understanding of what the responders really need. Trust me, it’s not covered in any of the movies, you actually have to talk with them. Before a disaster. During, they are way too busy and are justifiably deeply suspicious of anything outside of their network of relationships..

Which reminds me about the time a group of technologists were told by an agency that their technology wasn’t needed, but showed up at the disaster anyway (I warned them not to do that), and were jailed and their gear impounded. Yep, interfering with a response is an offense. And the incident commander makes the call as to what constitutes interference.

Mismatched technology plus bad manners = deep abiding negative view of robots.

Anyway, ground robots good, aerial robots good, all good for wildland firefighting when applied appropriately! But we’ve got to educate the firefighters about what’s out there and ourselves about what they need. Don’t shoot the messenger