SXSW!

Posted by admin on Mar 13, 2017 at 5:05 pm America/Chicago

I will be participating in the SXSW panel on Beyond BB-8: When Robots Start Acting Human! Another opportunity to talk about disaster robotics and show how robots and AI are assisting the emergency and disaster communities. It's been a busy few months at CRASAR. More companies and universities have joined Roboticists Without Borders and we participated in a four county wilderness search and rescue exercise last month with small unmanned aerial systems and a small unmanned marine vehicle with sonar for recovering a submerged body.  The sUAS work yielded valuable data on the use of thermal imaging for finding survivors (short version: not great if the victim is under a tree), and general workflow and concepts of operations. Three of our Roboticists Without Borders members- Justin Adams, David Kovar, and David Merrick- also chaired sessions at the first National Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Drone Conference and Summit. I've given several talks, including the Assessing the Technological Turn on Humanitarian Action workshop for the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore program in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) and I'll be at the UN in June. But nearest and dearest to my heart is that we continue to forge forward on the use of unmanned surface vehicles, small UAVs, computer vision,  and LTE wireless solutions to assist with preventing the marine mass casualty drownings of the refugees. The two EMILYs donated in our deployment last year are still in use by the Hellenic Coast Guard (who used it to rescue over 20 refugees stranded on the rocks in high seas) and Hellenic Red Cross and we look forward to taking more autonomous versions back this summer. We got great feedback from the Italian Coast Guard. But it's a been a year and we'd like to directly help... See you at SXSW!