the Program Booklet - IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology ...

2012 GHTC Page 74
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
4:00pm – 6:00pm
North, 3 rd Floor
Robotics and Automation for
Humanitarian Activities
Speakers and Abstracts
��Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Activities
Dr. Raj Madhavan, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland
College Park & IEEE Robotics and Automation Society
Can existing R&A technologies be put to use for solving
problems that can benefit society in general and improve
the quality of life for humanity? If yes, how can we
leverage existing technology? If not, what are the
missing elements and gaps? What is the "low hanging
fruit" that can be targeted? What are long-term issues?
This talk will provide an overview of related activities in
the robotics community and provide a review of possible domains of interest.
��Lessons Learned from a Decade of Rescue Robots
Dr. Robin R. Murphy, Director, Center for Robot-Assisted Search & Rescue,
Texas A&M University
Ground, air, or marine rescue robots have been used for
25 known disasters or extreme incidents starting with
the 2001 World Trade Center disaster and most recently
have been deployed at the twin disasters of the Tohoku
Earthquake and Tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear
emergency. The majority of deployments have been to
mine disasters or to collapses of urban structures from
terrorism, accidents, or meteorological events. Robots have not directly
assisted with saving a life but are credited with speeding the search for
survivors, reducing risk to responders, and accelerating economic recovery.
Robots are still uncommon and most agencies or stakeholders do not own
robots, preventing their timely incorporation into the response activities.
Rescue robots work very well, though far from perfect. While our studies
suggest the mean time between failures for rescue robots is fairly low by
manufacturing standards, on the order of a failure for every 20 hours of
operation, rescue robots work in much shorter missions. Robots have only
“died in place” in four out of 24 incidents, which is reasonable given the
extreme environments that they operate in. 50% of the failures are due to
human error, which strongly suggests that human-¬robot interaction is a, if
not the, major barrier facing rescue robotics. The two publicized failures at
Fukushima were either incorrect or misrepresented.