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

Just as I was sitting down to blog (with relief) about the rescue of the Chinese miners, the explosion in West Virginia hit the news. Terrible, terrible. Our prayers go out to the miners and families.

Rescue robots have been used in mine disasters in the past and perhaps they will be of service in Raleigh, WV.

Some background on mine rescue robots. From 2007-2008, I led a study for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) on underground mine rescue robots, getting to work with Dr. Jeff Kravitz and his team, attending a rescue competition at the MSHA academy in West Virginia, plus participated in two different mine disasters: Midas Gold Mine and Crandall Canyon Utah. A summary of the study was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine.

Jeff had been exploring rescue robots from mine disasters since before 9/11(!) and has pioneered their use- MSHA is second only to CRASAR in the number of deployments to actual incidents.

Coal mine disasters are tricky for robots- in part because methane is often present. As in “hmm… which would be worse- the explosion or the huge amounts of coal catching fire?” I know of only 1 robot rated to work in those conditions and not trigger an explosion- MSHA’s modified Remotec Wolverine, called V2. Making it intrinsically safe made it much bigger and much heavier, which are not necessarily pluses for agility. MSHA has an iRobot Packbot and is upgrading it, while NIOSH has a set of Gemini robots developed by Sandia Labs. The smaller robots we used at Midas and Crandall Canyon didn’t have to be intrinsically safe because one was a gold mine and the air quality testing at the coal mine showed there was no significant presence of methane- mine environments in the Rockies are different from mine environments in the East.

Mine disasters are also tricky because there are at least three different scenarios for using a robot- and each scenario favors a different type of robot. One size does not fit all. I’ll try to upload some slides to go through the unique challenges posed by each scenario.

The news this morning of the Chilean earthquake continues to highlight the possibilities for robots to help in the response and recovery.

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.

I’m getting a lot of questions about why wasn’t CRASAR, or any robotic technology, in Haiti. Interestingly, some of the questions indicate anger at agencies and while I thought CRASAR could have been of use in saving lives and learned important lessons for science, I’d like to defend the decision not to invite us.

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.