Category: Breaking News

Nepal: recommendations for small UAVs

As the tragedy in Nepal unfolds, the immediate rescue response has ended and now efforts are shifting to agencies working on the mitigation of the event and dealing with continuing cascade of consequences and hopefully to recovery as well as humanitarian relief.  We have not been asked to participate and cannot self deploy but to those planning to fly small UAVs, I recommend that you look over the range of uses of small UAVs in the past 8 earthquakes in the past blog (and in more detail in Disaster Robotics). Plus:

  • Be aware that the altitude may change the performance of your platform
  • Working in complex terrains such as mountains will impact any preplanned paths. We have found that imagery reconstructions from fixed-wings will do better with a series of flights “stair stepping” along a hill or mountain than trying to cover the entire area at one altitude. Also a flight at one altitude may violate any flight AGL restrictions because to be high enough to fly at the top of the mountain, you’ve almost certainly exceeded the AGL limits for the lowest part of the terrain. We have found that rotorcraft flight plans work better as a set of vertical planes.
  • If you are planning to conduct structural inspection missions, you will most likely need to fly with 3-10m of the structure. Be aware that this creates wind effects and can interfere with GPS and wireless connectivity. Also, our research with civil engineers indicates that no matter how much video or photos we try to take, having a specialist who knows exactly what to look for is critical.
  • Expect engineers and structural specialists to use the raw images. Our studies at Disaster City indicate that orthomosaics do not accurately show straight edges on buildings and have a slight bit of ghosting, regardless if from fixed or rotorcraft.
  • Be aware that the country may have a temporary flight restriction in order to protect manned helicopters working at low altitudes in the area- that applies to anything that flies, there are no hobbyist exemptions. The normal procedure is for ANY aircraft, manned or unmanned, to coordinate with the air traffic control so that the manned helicopters can continue to operate. Regardless, manned systems cannot see small UAVs and thus cannot avoid. Should they see a small UAV operating and are not briefed, they typically have to return to base because of the possibility of a collision. Sending someone to the Air Branch of the incident command can go a long way to making sure ad hoc flights don’t accidentally interrupt other activities.

 

Nepal: disaster robots and earthquakes- history and uses

Our thoughts and prayers to the victims, families, and responders in Nepal where CNN is reporting over 777 people killed. Here is some information about how disaster robots have and can be used.

Uses: the primary use of disaster robots in 8 previous earthquakes have been to give authorities and experts rapid understanding of the damage and general situation, the state of the infrastructure – especially underwater portions of bridges and ports which is key for transportation of responders and supplies, and the state of building collapses- especially where there is the indication of survivors or where the building must be inspected by experts but it appears to be too unsafe to inspect.

History: Small unmanned systems have been reported for use in response and mitigation of 8 earthquakes. The first reported use in 2004- an experimental ground robot from IRS exploring a house in the Niigati Chuestsu (Japan) earthquake with the Japanese equivalent of FEMA. In 2009 a small UAV was deployed in Italy by La Sapienza with the Italian Fire Department for the L’aquila Earthquake. At the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, the Navy MSDU used underwater ROVs to clear the port so that ships could bring in responders and supplies without running aground or collapsing the piers. The Haitian airspace was under a temporary flight restriction but there was a  small UAV that self-deployed and performed reconnaissance. A small UAV was tried for indoor inspection of the cathedral at the Christchurch earthquake (2011) but the structural specialists shifted to ground robots.  Underwater robots were used extensively by municipalities with some use of the ground robots and small UAVs for structural inspection at the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami in 2011.  Small ground and UAVs were used by the NifTI team with the Italian Fire Department at the Finale Emilia earthquake for structural inspection in 2012. The Chinese military used small UAVs at the 2013 Lushan China earthquake and the 2014 Yunnan China earthquake for rapid reconnaissance of hard to reach areas.

 

 

Vanuatu: How disaster robots have helped in 12 similar events and might help there

I’m here at the UN World Disaster Conference where word of the destruction in Vanuata is coming in and our thoughts and prayers go to out the victims and families. It sounds like the effort is on humanitarian relief.  I’m not seeing any discussion of mitigation/response/recovery of critical infrastructure, which is the historical focus of disaster robotics. Here’s some information on how robots have helped in 12 similar disasters.

Small unmanned aerial systems have been used by rescue authorities in 8 storm or flooding events: Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Wilma, Typhoon Morakot (Taiwan),  Thailand floods, Typhoon Haiyan (Philippines), Boulder Colorado floods, SR530 mudslide and flood, Serbia floods. UAS are most often used for rapid reconnaissance and mapping of the extent of devastation, condition of transportation routes and what areas are cut off, power lines, and general hydrological and geological mitigation needed to predict, contain, or drain water, etc.

Small marine vehicles have been used by rescue authorities in 3 storm and flooding events: Hurricane Wilma, Hurricane Ike, Tohoku tsunami (Japan).  They are mostly used to identify the state of bridges and ports, debris that is blocking ports or polluting fishing areas, and for the recovery of victims that were washed away into the sea. Plus they were used at the Haiti earthquake to clear underwater debris from the port to allow humanitarian relief supplies to be shipped in (it’s hard to feed a country via planes into a single airport). In Japan, the use of marine vehicles by the IRS-CRASAR team was credited for re-opening the Minamisaniruku new port 6 months earlier than would have been possible with manual divers and in time for the key salmon fishing season.

Unmanned ground robots are almost never used because commercial buildings rarely collapse in these conditions, it is mostly individual homes.

Tohoku earthquake anniversity and UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction

wcdrr-logo-desktop-v3.0It is the 4th anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and I am en route to Sendai where the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. It is sobering to think that over 18,000 people died and that the great nation of Japan is still recovering.  It makes it even more appropriate for Japan to host the conference and at Sendai. I look forward to seeing my colleagues from the International Rescue Systems Institute who we worked side-by-side with unmanned marine vehicles.

I will be giving an invited talk on the current state and achievement of  disaster robotics during the Public Forum. In looking back between 2011 and now, the biggest surprise is that unmanned marine vehicles are not being used as much as I would have thought. The tsunami response and recovery showed the efficacy of these tools and how the can do in 4 hours what it take divers weeks to do (if they are available). There’s no surprise in that unmanned systems are being used more frequently! I’ll post the my findings when I give my talk– no spoilers!

Thoughts on what the proposed FAA SUAS rules mean for search and rescue

by Brittan Duncan with Robin Murphy

Here are our notes on the recommended rules, which are currently open for public comment and are not in force, and how they might impact public agencies, especially fire rescue.  Current operations should still be run under the existing COA process for public agencies. Also, even though the rules are open for public comments for 60 days, that doesn’t mean the rules will be made official in 60 days or that these will indeed be the final rules.

In the future, COAs may not be necessary for flight, as the rules would let agencies pick and choose whether to fly as a civil operation or as a public entity.

If you are flying in Class G and under 500 feet AGL with a registered vehicle less than 55 pounds and a top speed of less than 100mph with a pilot who has passed the proposed UAS ground school (“aeronautical knowledge test”), you won’t need a COA. You will still have to comply with NOTAMs, TFRs, see-and-avoid rules, and rules for flying over people. Note: you will also need to consider any local regulations on privacy, etc. Remember, just because the FAA says you can fly without a COA in an area, it doesn’t mean your constituency finds it acceptable.

If you are flying in other classes of airspace, you have work with the local ATC. Exactly how this happens is unclear and we suspect that in practice many ATCs will say “get a COA” and in some of those cases, you may still have to have to pilot with a civilian pilot’s license. Hopefully not, but that’s still unclear. It would be the worst case scenario, though, which is manageable.  This gives more flexibility for emergency situations where you need to fly in a tower controlled area but hadn’t made prior arrangements with the ATC- they can say “ok, you can fly this one time but let’s work out a better plan after the emergency is over.” Of course, the ATC can also say “no.”

You can fly over people who are covered, such as those in their houses in a neighborhood or in their cars in traffic, but you are responsible for mitigation, as in: your agency is liable.  You would be allowed to fly over uncovered people only if they  are directly participating in the operation (like other fire fighters and police) and have received a briefing. However, as a public agency, that may not be realistic except during training or highly localized flights during an incident where the site was cordoned off. Fortunately, it looks like agencies will have some discretion in how they alert civilians. Informing residents that you are flying in their area to search for a person, asking people to stay indoors temporarily, posting signage, etc., may be sufficient. Your agency probably already has SOP for various activities and those can be expanded to handle SUAS.  Note that even if your agency feels it is acting within its bounds, SUAS make some people very antsy and thus anything you can do to proactively reduce misperceptions will probably benefit your agency in the long run.

You still have to maintain line of sight.  Still no looking through binoculars or cameras. This applies to both the operator and the visual observer, who must both be able to see the vehicle at any time and should be able to tell which direction it is facing, as well as direction of flight.

You can have a mobile operation with a visual observer on a moving boat, but not a moving car.   This is great news for agencies who want to map rivers or wetlands, “meh” for everyone else.

You can have multiple UAS in the same airspace, but each requires their own pilot and visual observer. We are looking forward to this as we see a need in wilderness search and rescue for a fixed-wing to conduct a thorough survey at a higher altitude while a rotor-craft is directed to the high probability spots for a missing person.

You can eliminate the separate visual observer if the pilot flies “heads up” and always keeps eyes on the UAS. Note: This is only allowed for flights in which you are not using any first person view- you can’t “fly the camera” as the pilot without a visual observer. Our studies with SUAS and decades of studies in manned aviation suggest a single person switching between first person view and external views can lead to errors, so although it adds manpower (sigh) we agree with this.

When you want to use first person view, in conjunction with a visual observer, the visual observer is not allowed to manipulate any flight controls, look through the camera to pan/tilt/zoom in on an object, or initiate any autonomy (e.g., select waypoints). Your mission specialist (for us, there’s usually a responder saying “no, this is what I want to look at”) can’t be your visual observer. This is important to note in systems that require multiple interfaces, such as a hand controller and a computer.  Another option is to fund our research in multi-modal user interfaces that don’t overwhelm the pilot and don’t require them to look at a screen!

You have to have 5 minutes of reserve power to insure a return to home and controlled landing. Note: in practice, you also want to keep track of the distance to home/time to home. We think the real point is always being able to return home unless there is a catastrophic failure of the SUAS.  5 minutes may be excessive for small areas where the SUAS can return safely in less than 2 minutes, but no one has ever been sad to have too much fuel.

You can’t fly at night. It looks like you will have to go through the COA process for this.  The SUAS rules document actually says “The FAA welcomes public comments with suggestions on how to effectively mitigate the risk of operations of small unmanned aircraft during low-light or nighttime operations.”  Which sounds like “if you’ve got any ideas, let us know, because we didn’t come up with anything that could be a hard and fast rule.”

FAA Small UAS rules: impact unclear on emergency response agencies

Yesterday the FAA released their proposed rules for small UAS. The summary focuses on the impact on commercial industry with the implication that emergency response agencies will continue to have to function under the “old” rules of applying for COAs even for class G space. I will be reading through the entire document (it’s 159 pages) in the next couple of days to see what the real impact is.

Mexico City hospital collapse…

A building collapse is almost always terrible, a building collapse of a maternity ward is unthinkable. All of us send our thoughts and prayers to the families of this horrible event.

Although there is no news about any robots being used, robots were first used in disasters for commercial multi-story building collapses– notably the 9/11 World Trade Center. Commercial multi-story buildings present unique challenges for searching because the concrete floors can be densely pancaked in some areas with just inches of space and leave survivable voids in others.

Small robots like the shoe-boxed sized micro VGTV and micro Tracks by Inkutun were used the most at the WTC because they could go into the rubble where a person or dog could not fit and could go further than a camera on a wand. That is still the case, with small robots being used to go between tightly packed layers of rubble at the Berkman Plaza II collapse in Jacksonville (2007) and the Prospect Towers collapse in New Jersey (2010).

Bigger robots such as the IED robots like iRobot Packbot and QinetiQ Talon are often too big for the size of voids in the rubble of a pancake collapse. Really large, “maxi” robots such as the REMOTEC series are not only too big, but the weight poses a problem- as in they are so heavy they could cause a secondary collapse.

If anyone knows of other multi-story building collapses where robots were used, please let me know and a reference and I’ll send a CRASAR patch.

In the meantime, our thoughts and prayers to the families in Mexico…

Ebola Robot Workshop at Texas A&M: my report out

TEEX trainer in protective gear with a "MUTT" robot carrying a litter at the workhop demo.
TEEX trainer in protective gear with a “MUTT” robot carrying a litter at the workhop demo.

CRASAR, with funding from the Center for Emergency Informatics, and the TEEX Product Development center held a two day series of workshops on robotics for medical disasters.  The major takeaway was that robots do exist that could be immediately repurposed now to protect Ebola health workers but how robots fit into the medical response enterprise is as important as what the robots can actually do. While most roboticists intuitively know that what will work in the US is not the same as what will work in West Africa, the differences go beyond physical constraints such as level floors, ample power, and reliable wireless communications infrastructure. Less intuitive is that the cultural appropriateness of the technology and the impact on the existing workflows and practices is equally important.

The workshops considered how robots could be used immediately and in future domestic medical responses. Hardened robots (and automation/CPS technologies) do exist that could be immediately repurposed to provide logistical services (e.g., packing and hauling contaminated waste) and reconnaissance (e.g. observing signs of mass graves near a village), less so for clinical applications (e.g., directly working with patients). The participants strongly concurred that a research roadmap is needed to prepare robots that the US can effectively use in future medical disasters.

The success of hardened robots in providing these services depends on ensuring that they are appropriate for the work domain in five ways:

  1.  Fit the cultural context. For example, a telepresence robot allowing a certified medical interpreter to talk with the family and talk the patient’s history may overwhelm a non-Western family who has never seen a computer. A less obtrusive telepresence solution may be more practical in that cultural context.
  2. Fit the existing workflow and practices. For the short term, solutions aren’t solutions if they require health workers or medical responders to adopt radically new procedures. They simply can’t handle more things to do or change how they perform their current tasks (which impacts how everyone performs all the other tasks- “simple” changes can have system ramifications). However, small changes that produce at least a tenfold benefit can make a difference.
  3. Can function in the target environment. For example robots in West Africa would have work reliably in field hospitals with canvas floors and narrow doors, muddy dirt roads in the rainy season, with power and wireless communications limitations, etc., while robots in the US would have more pristine conditions. Different groups use different decontamination procedures and chemicals- such as dousing everything with chlorine beach solution (easy and inexpensive) or using more chemically sophisticated decontamination foams used by urban hazardous materials teams.
  4. Are maintainable and sustainable. Health workers and medical responders won’t have the time and skills to repair robots (especially if wearing PPE) and may not have access to consumables such as batteries to enable operations for weeks and months. A problem with the Fukushima response was that many robots were actually prototypes functioning at a Technical Readiness Level of 7 rather than a well-tested Level 9 system.
  5. Are easy to use and be trained on. This is related to fitting into the existing workflow and practices, but deserves special emphasis. The health workers and responders will not have significant amounts of time to learn new tools, as their days are already overloaded and they have little personal time.  Robots must be vetted for ease of use. Effective training for medical missions is important and the role of simulation or serious games should not under-estimated.

The sentiment shared by the TAMU participants was that the biggest barrier to near-term use was not the lack of capable robots but rather the lack of requirements that would allow industry to invest in repurposing robots and  enable agencies to test and evaluate the robots and develop training.  Currently there are no details on the operational envelopment for the robot or operator. There is no clearinghouse of social science data on cultural appropriateness or bioethics or specific missions.

OVERVIEW OF WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES

The first day of the workshop was hosted by CRASAR and held at the National Center for Therapeutic Manufacturing. The day was divided into two portions. One was a simulcast of shared presentations with the other three sites and brainstorming as part of the planning workshops on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers for the White House OSTP/National Robotic Initiative. The other part, the Texas A&M Workshop on Robotic, Automation and Cyber Physical Systems for Medical Response to Disasters, provided additional talks and discussions on general domestic medical response. The Texas A&M talks covered the state of the practice in DoD robots (TARDEC) and casualty evacuation systems (TATRC) that can be repurposed, lessons learned so far in using robots at the Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning (University of Tokyo), and opportunities for community recovery (TAMU Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center). The day culminated with a reception and a thought provoking keynote talk by Andrew Natsios (TAMU Bush School of Government and Public Policy), who served as administrator of USAID from 2001-2006.

The second day, the Infectious Disease Response Workshop,  was hosted by Caleb Holt and the TEEX Product Development Center and held at the TEEX Emergency Operations Training Center/Disaster City® complex. The focus was on the practice of medical response (one of TEEX many courses that they teach). A major portion of the day was spent in demonstrations of the current practices in medical response, walking participants through 3 modules of a field hospital (also called an Emergency Treatment Unit or ETU), showing how contaminated waste is stored and overpacked, and how domestic responders, equipment, and ambulances are decontaminated. One demonstration was not a current practice but showed how existing robots might be of use.  That demonstration showed the General Dynamics Land Systems MUTT, a robot wagon that acts like a dog and can carry waste, supplies, or one or two litters. A responder guides the robot with a leash rather than a video game controller that is hard to carry and use while wearing personal protective equipment. If the responder stops, the robot stops. If the person backs up, the robot backs up. The second day also featured panels of practitioners, including from the Texas Ebola Task Force and the USMC Chemical Biological Incident Response Force, comparing military and domestic practices

TAMU FINDINGS ON WHAT ROBOTS CAN BE USED FOR

In terms of overall medical disasters, applications appear to fall into one of three broad categories below, regrouping the preliminary list of nine functions discussed in an earlier blog. Each category has a different set of stakeholders and a different operational envelope that the robots would operate in. Clinical applications are possibly what people think of first– how robots can replace what health workers do now—but logistical applications are perhaps the most feasible and practical.

Clinical:  Clinical applications are where robots are used in the ETU as a “force multiplier” (another way of saying “reducing manpower”) by taking over some of the activities that health workers do or as adding reliability by coaching or supervising activities. Ignoring for a moment the cultural appropriateness and other adoption issues, robots could enable

  • Remote health workers to assist other health workers, such as telepresence robots (or just cameras/tablets) coaching or supervising taking off PPE– though the general consensus of our responder base was that having a second person physically helping with decon was more valuable than having someone saying “hey, you touched your face while trying to lift your hood.” Domestic hazmat responders and the USMC Chemical Biological Incident Response Forces use a two personal decontamination process.
  • Health workers could use robots to interact with patients, reducing the number of times workers have to risk exposure.  Robots could provide non-invasive point-of-care such as changing IV bags, though the TAMU participants were more reserved about roboticizing invasive procedures such as starting IV lines.
  • Remote health workers to interact with family members, such as remote qualified medical interpreters working through telepresence to help with patient intake forms.

Logistical: Logistical applications can take place within the ETU, but the construction, layout, and clutter of ETUs make it hard for mobile robots to move around. Some ETUs have canvas floors over dirt or mostly level manufactured floors, and almost all have raised areas to step over between modules that seem intended to foul wheels. The general thought is that flexible automation and materials handling are more likely to be of benefit within an ETU and that robots would be more useful for outside the ETU. Logistical robots are also interesting in terms of stakeholders. Since they are not performing clinical functions, in theory the robots could be operated by locals (assuming favorable cultural considerations).

Logistical robots could provide

  • Materials handling. Robots could reduce the number of times humans handle contaminated waste or the number of people needed to carry a litter. The robots could pack and carry materials from the warm zone to the cold zone (e.g., taking out the trash) or carry supplies into the warm zone, saving another cycle of a person having to don and doff PPE.
  • Decontamination. Robots could spray biocide foam on equipment, though there was several ideas for using gases to rapidly decontaminate ambulances so as to keep them in service.
  • Delivery and resupply. Unmanned aerial vehicles or boats could drop off small amounts of supplies to villages cut off by the rainy season.

Reconnaissance: Reconnaissance activities take place outside of the ETU. Aerostats or UAVs can provide awareness of long lines or gathering refugees. A more somber recon activity is to fly over villages and look for signs of freshly turned earth indicating graves.

Other:  The workshops also touched on preparation for medical response, such as redesigning field hospitals to make it easy to use robots and to add cameras, internet repeaters, etc. The workshops raised the value of automated construction in reducing the non-medical members of the team needed to set up and maintain the ETU.

More About Our Workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers Nov. 7-8

CRASAR members in Level A (2004)
CRASAR members in Level A (2004)

Texas A&M is one of the four sites co-hosting a OSTP/NRI Workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers. Our workshop will be November 7-8, with November 7 coordinated with the other three sites and November 8 as a follow-on at Disaster City specifically on technology transfer. We are still working on the agenda, but attendance is limited and by invitation. Participants need to be physically at College Station in order to help generate and rank the list of opportunities for robotics to give to the White House and to work with the medical and humanitarian responders to elicit operational details critical for successful technology transfer. Attached are some photos of a 2004 robotics exercise we hosted with the USMC Chemical Biological Incident Response Force- as you can see we learned a lot about working with PPE. Likewise our involvement in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident reinforced and amplified how little things can trip up responses.

Our site’s workshop  will address how robots can be used beyond protecting Ebola workers and that it will focus not only on helping identify what robots can do but on how robots must do it in order to be successful. Here at A&M we are striving to create a set of detailed use cases and projected robot requirements that can be used by industry and the TEEX Product Development Center. The robotics community cannot provide robots without understanding the needs otherwise engineering mistakes or mismatches that will be both  financially costly and delay the delivery of effective solutions.

Robot carrying a victim at CRASAR/USMC CBIRF exercise (2004)
Robot carrying a victim at CRASAR/USMC CBIRF exercise (2004)

To meet these objectives, our workshop is focused on working with medical and humanitarian relief experts (they talk, we listen) to answer two questions:

  • what are the most pressing problems, barriers, or bottlenecks? e.g. minimizing contact while burying bodies or disposing of waste, health worker protection from infection,decontamination and disinfection of facilities, detection of presence of Ebola in facilities,tele-consulting by remote experts, health work physical safety, delivery of supplies, etc.
  • What is the value proposition of using a robot? e.g., benefits versus manpower, logistics support, training requirements, economic costs, etc.Is a robot the best choice? For example, Dr. Mark Lawley here in Industrial and Systems Engineering is working on adapting low-cost flexible manufacturing methods for waste and materials handling within the field hospitals where a mobile robot would be a technological overkill.
In my previous blog, I described 9 categories of applications that we’ve identified so far for robots for Ebola.  It’s fairly easy to come up with ideas and there is a wealth of ground, aerial, and marine robots that can be repurposed. But it’s much harder to determine  what’s the real value to the medical and humanitarian responders and to ferret out those hidden requirements that support a successful technology transfer.  Our research and hands-on experiences at CRASAR has shown that military robots have not been a perfect match for fire rescue and law enforcement and many attempts by vendors to deploy their robots to disasters or to sell their robots to the homeland security community have failed. I see these failures stemming from three  types of constraints: the operational envelope, work domain,and culture.
 
  • The operational envelope focuses on workspace attributes such as environmental conditions, size of doors in field hospitals, communication and power infrastructure, etc. As detailed in Disaster Robotics, several types of rescue robots were not used at the 9/11 World Trade Center because they could not fit in the luggage bays on buses hired to carry FEMA search and rescue teams. Some concerns about robots such as how can robots be decontaminated  become moot  if the robot can be recharged and maintained by workers inside the Hot Zone so that it never needs decon– but this of course means that functions can be performed by workers wearing personal protection equipment.
  • The work domain is critical as anyone who works in system design knows. Who are the stakeholders? Will these robotic solution employ locals so as to help support their economy? If so, what does that mean in terms of making robots that are easy to use and reliable? We use a formal method called cognitive work analysis to determine the work domain.
  • Culture is technically part of the work domain, but I personally think it merits special attention. We robot designers need to have cultural sensitivity to customsfor caring for the ill and conducting burials if we create robots to tend to the sick and transport the deceased. The rhythms of village life also impact humanitarian relief, for example it is better for a medium sized UAV to drop off a large payload of supplies and let the village equivalent of the American Red Cross representative go fetch it and deliver it to different households as part of their daily routine or should a smaller UAV do a precision drop to individuals?
Robot operator's view from the controller
Robot operator’s view from the controller

Robot eye view of victim being transported so medical person can make sure they aren't having a seizure, etc.
Robot eye view of victim being transported so medical person can make sure they aren’t having a seizure, etc.

Robots to contribute to new Ebola-fighting efforts

As fears continue to grow over the recent outbreak of Ebola, scientists and researchers in the U.S. are hoping to develop a strategy for combating the virus’ spread through the use of robots and autonomous vehicles. November 7th will see workshops put together by the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue that brings robotocists together with members of the medical and humanitarian aid communities to hopefully find a solution.

The initial idea is that depending on the situation, robots can be used as mobile interpreters, methods of delivery for much-needed supplies such as medicine and food, and even during the most dangerous of tasks like decontamination or burying deceased victims. “What are the things robotics can do to help?” poses Robin Murphy, a robotics professor at Texas A&M University, as well as the director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. One idea put forward by a robotics engineer is to take a wheeled robot and attach two decontamination sprayers, and then have it work in places where the virus has been found, or on cleaning equipment.

What is being stressed leading up to the workshops is that robots are not act as full replacements for human aid workers. The goal is to minimize workers’ contact, but for every piece of technology put to use, there should still be a human to interact with.

For more information, visit slasher.com