Category: Director’s Blog

In Minamisanriku-Cho, gearing up for first mission

It is dawn here at Minamisanriku and from my hotel room, I can see streaks of orange over the New Port, the site we first searched and cleared in April. The tendrils of fog driftly past the small islands dotting Shizugawa Bay. We start checking our gear in another hour before breakfast and depart to an inlet on the northern border of the bay. There we will meet with city officials and fishermen who have asked us to find underwater debris, map it, and attach a float to it so that it can be removed.

 

We have brought two robots for the mission: a OceanServer autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that looks like a small yellow torpedo. It carries side scan sonar and will map out the area of the bay rapidly, probably within a hour. That will let us know where debris or possible debris is, which will then use the SARbot from SeaBotix from a boat to investigate. With its gripper, we should be able to attach a float to the underwater debris to mark it for easy identification for later removal. If not, IRS has two divers with us who will do it manual. Meanwhile the AUV will move to a new location and we will work in sequence: get “big picture” with AUV,  perform “little” actions with the tethered ROV.

 

But just having robots isn’t the same as getting the information to the right people at the right time- which is also called the “data-to-decision” problem. We will be integrating the data from the two robots using the General Dynamics GeoSuites software package- which is a civilian version of the command and control software used by the military. This will help us, the robot team keep up with the two groups deploying the AUV and ROV in different areas at the same time AND allow tactical responders such as Kenichi Makabe and his team of fire fighters who will be joining us  to see the fused and geolocated incoming data. GeoSuites will let multiple users have a global visual “common ground” that lets different groups get the view of the enterprise that they need, allowing me to see what everyone is doing, while letting officials start planning for removal and our GIS experts learn and start generating models of where more debris will be found.

On Way to Japan: IRS-CRASAR return to Minamisanriku-cho

We are flying out today, bringing back the SeaBotix SARbot and adding in an Oceanserver autonomous underwater vehicle, plus the EDGE network is sending GeoSuites to explore distributing the data and we have a  GIS expert from TAMU-CC.

We’ll be returning to Minamisanriku-cho, one of the two cities we visited in April. The mission that our colleagues at the International Rescue Systems Institute is quite different- we are tasked to find and clear debris in the surrounding bay. We plan to use the OceanServer AUV to quickly map portions of the bay, then use the ROV to attach a float and post it on the map and distribute it through GeoSuites. However, as Rick Smith, our GIS expert says, there’s more to cartography than putting red pins on a map- we are hoping to predict where other debris will be. GeoSuites is the civilian version of TIGR, the common operating picture software used by the US military– Brian Slaughter will be managing that. Eric Steimle (AEOS) is our lead again and Jesse is on the SARbot again.  YSI/Nanotech,  the OceanServer distributor in Japan, will meet the IRS-CRASAR team there.

Wish us well– the slow pace of recovery in Minamisanriku was reported on by the New Times here.  We are honored to join our Japanese colleagues at IRS in participatory research: learning while doing.

Hurricane Irene: hope it’s not 7.5 days after landfall that robots get deployed

The Roboticists Without Borders members are standing by to assist with Hurricane Irene at no cost.

We’ve been pinging our contacts in the response and emergency management communities to remind them about the uses of robots. I recently presented a paper at AUVSI that analyzed the 8 known deployments of robots at 7 disasters in 2010– if the incident command agency or company already had robots or an agreement in place, robots were used with 0.5 days. If not, it was an average of 7.5 days before the robots were used (land, marine, or air– that wasn’t a factor), well beyond the critical life saving first few days. 10 years after the successful use at 9/11, robots still haven’t been integrated into responses.

For a hurricane, as with a small earthquake or tornado, UAVs and marine vehicles tend to be of more immediate and impact larger regions than ground robots. That’s because there is usually little damage to large numbers of commercial buildings- instead homes are devastated. But homes create debris fields less than 3m deep, which canines and existing tools work great with and faster than small ground robots. State National Guard teams often fly Predators, but don’t rule out the value of small UAVs hand launched by response teams to get on demand “hummingbird” views of the situation.

New Jersey has two UASI teams with ground robots and I’ve heard they’ve been looking at small UAVs, but I don’t know of any other response agencies in the projected area with rescue robots. Please let me know if there are (we’ll mail you a CRASAR patch for confirmed info).

But regardless, my thoughts on Hurricane Irene  comes down to this: I hope that no lives will be lost and damage will be minimal.

June 22: Robo Virtual Summit on Mobile Robots for Emergency Response

The Robo Virtual Summit this summer was to be on navigation and autonomy but now has shifted to Mobile Robots for Emergency Response, with people such as Bob Quinn talking about the QinetiQ robots and Tim Trainer about the iRobot bots at Fukushima- these are guys with their boots on the ground. Other good talks as well. I will be giving one of the talks (actually it was taped last week) in the afternoon and be available for questions. Check it out!

Japanese Colleagues Get JST Grant and CRASAR plans its return

Prof. Fumitoshi Matsuno, the vice-president of the International Rescue Systems Institute (IRS), and the organizer of the IRS-CRASAR deployment with the ROVs north of Sendai had just received a grant from the Japanese Science and Technology agency according the Japan Times. The IRS team certainly deserves funding for their continued efforts. This grant matches our NSF RAPID.  We have received the second phase funds of our RAPID and expect to return to work with Prof. Matsuno and Prof. Kimura again in September or October. Thank you NSF!

Presentation at the Preliminary Report on the Disaster and Robotics in Japan: Special Forum at ICRA 2011

forum position.pptx is the presentation I gave on May 11, 2011– I’ve had requests for it, so here it is. It’s a .pdf file so it may open in another window or ask to be downloaded depending on your browser. I was asked to discuss all US robots used to date at the disaster, not just the IRS-CRASAR Roboticists Without Borders deployment,  and thanks iRobot, QinetiQ, and Honeywell for their help. Any errors are totally mine.

Tornadoes and mudslides

The horrific tornadoes in Missouri and the mudslide at the Malaysia orphanage are very sad. The events were a stark reminder of the lessons learned at the annual Summer Institute on emergency informatics hosted last weekend by Texas A&M at TEEX’s Disaster City and EOTC facility May 19-21.

Missouri illustrates that it’s both response and recovery. The life-saving response activities usually can (and due to the immediacy of the injuries have to) be managed by the local and regional groups, but the less obvious challenge is how to get the community rebuilt. Can aerial vehicles do more than help with response allocation but also speed insurance and small business claims? Can marine vehicles help find or clear debris? Can robots help with victim management, such as the work being done by the US Army TATRIC? Of course, it’s all moot if the responders don’t have these assets or can’t effectively distribute, visualize, and use the information… there’s a missing information infrastructure.

The mudslide illustrates the need to be able to “see” into an access denied area- which we call remote assessment or perception at a distance. Mudslides are always difficult due to low rate of survival of direct contact as the mud displaces all oxygen and the mud is particularly hard on a ground robot as we learned at the LaConchita deployment in 2005.  If there is a void, it’s a small one and it’s imperative to reach the survivor before their air is gone. Progress in ground penetrating radar remains slow but new advances such as Dan Goldman’s sandworm robot may make it possible to quickly find voids. Of course that means both advances in the technology but also acquisitions so that teams have the robots and don’t lose a day or more getting them in.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims and the families and the loss of the orphanage in Malaysia is doubly sad.