Search and Rescue Robots

An anonymous submitter sent in: "Interesting article on the New York Times [need an acct, blah] about the various robots currently in use to search the rubble of the WTC. Not a very technical article (expectedly). Seems to be all telepresence stuff. No mention of any autonomous devices, which is as I'd expect. Too bad we don't have a few platoons of those sony bipeds with firefighter/s&r programming to make that first response."

Comments

Another link

[rm-r]

the BBC has this piece on laser mapping of the rubble.

Re:Battery

[rm-r]

If anyone is interested in something about robots, but on a some what lighter note, try this article at the BBC. It's a robot that roams farms tracking and picking up slugs- the best bit is that it is fueled by their decomposing bodies!

mobile robot teleoperation

[hackman]

This is a really interesting opportunity for some high-tech to be applied to a real non-military situation. Robin Murphy came here to UCSD and talked a few months ago, and she actually brought (and we got to drive) the tracked one with the flippers in front.

Those things are not easy to drive. One of the most difficult things is getting a perspective on where the robot is in relation to it's surroundings (very rough rubble). This is an ongoing research area for many robotics teams, and one we have been working on also.

The submitter mentioned something about autonomous robots, I think they don't fully understand the difficulty of the problem which robotics researchers are working on. Navigating uneven building wreckage autonomously is an incredibly difficult problem, in general. Especially under the conditions of the WTC rubble. There may be some small parts of the process which can be automated, but I doubt it would be useful in this situation anyway. They were using the robots as probes to discover what was inside areas where it was dangerous for people to be there, so a human is already "in the loop". The real use of these systems is for remote visualization (i.e. show me what's in there) in hard to reach areas.

They didn't specify what types of cameras are being used, but this is a mostly visual problem from my understanding. Most robots have standard rectilinear camera views that are forward facing, unfortunately operation of these platforms is difficult becuause of the restricted field of view and inability to see on the left, right and behind the robot. Multiple cameras helps, but adds significant complexity and disjoint views. A technology which really makes this easier is an Omni-directional Video sensor (which has a 360 deg. field of view around the sensor). These are ideal for "immersed" applications like this, and they literally give the operator a view of the entire space around the bot (except for directly overhead) and allow you to determine the robot's orientation relative to obstacles easily. The same data can also be unwarped and used to create a perspective or panoramic view of the area in real time. A pair of these and stereo software (which also has been done in our lab, [shameless plug over]) can provide a full depth-map of the area. The ODVS has the difficulty of limited resolution (same CCD, larger fov) but this can be supplemented by a Pan/Tilt/Zoom rectilinear camera.

Really the interesting part of research in this direction is the remote operation and visualizations that help the perator navigate through the area to achieve it's goal. This is what my thesis is on, actually.

More info: UCSD CVRR Lab The Page of Omnidirectional Vision and our source of ODVS. Also check Vstone (in Japanese, may need to run that last one through babelfish or something).

Mobile Robots are cool. We even have one that pulls cables for us in the drop-ceiling of our lab... we're slowly working on a web-page for that new one.. I have a cool video for it already but it's HUGE (100M or so). Anyway, I'll shut up.

Brett

Other technologies were requested

[Sinistar2k]

A friend of mine works in the acoustics lab at a nearby university. Not long after the attack, they received a request to build a device that would allow rescuers to find people in the rubble by listening for breathing or cries for help that couldn't be heard otherwise. The team did get something together for this and went up to the site, but they never got to try it out.

This was a couple days after the attack and rescue workers had pretty much given up on survivors at that point (though the media continued to report otherwise). According to my friend, when he got there, the police and firefighters were concentrating the search on finding their own guys and had pretty much given up on finding anyone else.

He said that it took about 6 hours to get cleared to go onto the site itself, and then, after that, you were put in a queue to use the site for your task (searching, removing rubble, et cetera). They were bumped twice before being told they weren't going to be used, so the device never had a field test, but none of the team complained. They were in complete awe of the scene itself, and, while they ultimately felt helpless, they felt privileged just to be there and to speak with other crews and native New Yorkers. They managed to get some audio recordings of the area as well, thinking it might be important for historical reasons.

Re:login NOT required

[NTSwerver]

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