Hazards & Disasters

AITopics > Applications / Expert Systems > AI Applications Areas > Hazards & Disasters

"We must balance between saving people and putting fully functioning rescuers in harm's way," says [Adam] Jacoff. "We can send robots into the most dangerous and confined spaces. They are expendable." - Heading for Disasters "I just want to be of use," [Robin Murphy] says, as her bustling robot seminar winded down last week. "You look at what these guys in fire and rescue service have to do. The technology is there to help them. And it's up to my community of scientists to get to where we can give the right technology to the right people at the right time." - Robots to the Rescue

Introductory Readings

How high-tech is coming to the rescue - Scientists bring gadgets to post-Katrina disaster scene. By Alan Boyle. MSNBC.com (August 30, 2005). "In Hurricane Katrina's wake, researchers are bringing cutting-edge technologies to the disaster area, just as they did after catastrophes ranging from the 9/11 terror attacks to last year's Asian tsunami. ... The researchers who operate under the aegis of the search-and-rescue institute emphasize that they're not trying to take the place of emergency-response workers. 'It's not us saving people. It's us getting the technology to the people who will use it to save people,' explained Robin Murphy, a professor at the University of South Florida who directs the Institute for Safety Security Rescue Technology. 'I always hate it when I hear people saying that we think we're rescuers. We're not. We're scientists. That's our role.' Murphy and her USF team are heading to New Orleans to link up with Louisiana State University's Fire Emergency Training Institute and put their tools to the test. The tool kit sounds like a laundry list for 21st-century tech: Pint-size robots that can move through crevices in a collapsed building to bring water, light and two-way communications to trapped survivors. Murphy's team tested such devices in the wreckage of New York's World Trade Center after the terror attacks.... "

• Also see:
  • Officials Reverse Course and Say the Search for 6 Utah Miners Will Continue. The Associated Press / available from The New York Times (August 27, 2007). "Federal and mine company officials said a seventh borehole would be punched into the Crandall Canyon Mine and that a special robotic camera would be lowered into one of the holes drilled in previous efforts to find the men. ... The camera is similar to one used to search within the wreckage of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks of 2001. It can take images from about 50 feet away with the help of a 200-watt light, and can travel 1,000 feet from the end of the test hole, a much wider reach than previous cameras had in the search effort, in part because of its ability to crawl over rubble, officials said. ... Robin R. Murphy, director of the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida, which is supplying the camera, said its success was a long shot. Ms. Murphy said it was not clear whether it would fit all the way down the hole and into the mine, and that debris could obscure images. 'There’s mud, there’s rocks, there’s things that make it unfavorable,' she said. 'Certainly if we could find any sign of the miners, that would be terrific.'"
  • Better robots could help save disaster victims. By Kurt Kleiner. NewScientist.com news (January 5, 2006).
  • Robot rescue - These guys go where human searchers can't . A bay area company takes its technology to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, to show a team where it didn't need to look. By Dave Gussow. St. Petersburg Times (September 19, 2005). "Mark Micire makes it very clear: His robot did not rescue any victims of Hurricane Katrina. But it did come in handy. 'We saw inside structures that would not have been able to be searched by a human,' said Micire, 29 and president of American Standard Robotics in St. Petersburg. 'It's as important to find where not to search as it is where to search.' ... While many consumers think of robotic pets such as the Sony Aibo, appliances such as the Roomba vacuum cleaner or industrial robots, search and rescue wants a different image. 'This is something that has a little stronger humanitarian undertone,' Micire said. 'We're trying to build robots that serve people, that really have an impact when we need assistance the most.' Micire was part of a USF team that went to the World Trade Center after 9/11, which was a major learning event for the robotics field."
  • Robotic racers achieve milestone. By Chris Vallance. BBC news (October 9, 2005) "[Stanford University's School of Engineering] car, a Volkswagen Touareg nicknamed 'Stanley', has become the first self-navigating vehicle to successfully complete the gruelling 131.6 mile (211km) cross-country Darpa Grand Challenge, a race for autonomous robot vehicles held in Nevada's Mojave desert.... [M]any competitors are keen to stress the possible peaceful applications of this technology. Scott Wilson, of the Cajunbot team from the University of Louisiana, at Lafayette, spent days in a boat helping to rescue people from flooded areas of New Orleans. He saw at first hand how fears over safety slowed and in some cases halted rescue work. With driver-less vehicles, rescue might have come sooner."
  • Robots can be lifesaving rescue workers - Robotic aircraft play a role in assessing Katrina's damage. By Marsha Walton, with Daniel Sieberg contributing. CNN (September 15, 2005). "They look like big, high-tech toys. But robotic airplanes and helicopters with cameras, microphones and sensors can provide crucial information for emergency responders in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. 'You don't even have to wait until dawn the next morning to start flying to get a view of where the damage is, what areas have been hit hardest, what roads are still open, and how to get access to them,' said Robin Murphy, director of the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). Murphy, a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida, used the unmanned aerial vehicles in Pearlington, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi a couple days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. ... Search robots earned credibility after the 9/11 attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. 'At the World Trade Center we saw the first use of ground robots, they could go underneath, go into places that people and dogs simply couldn't fit into or that were still on fire. They could do things that people just couldn't or shouldn't do,' she said. But each disaster, natural or manmade, is different."
  • Tiny Robots To The Rescue - Special Machines Going Where Humans Can't. By Therese Poletti. Mercury News / available from SiliconValley.com (August 2, 2004). "The San Jose McEnery Convention Center looked like a bomb had hit it. Amid collapsed walls and debris, arms and legs of survivors waved through the rubble. The body parts were artificial. But they were the most important component of a mock disaster area set up at an artificial intelligence conference last week. Groups of small robots, some only about a foot high, rumbled over the wreckage on a mission to learn how to save lives. The robots had to negotiate the debris, find bodies that generated heat and communicate their location. Some robots were equipped with microphones to record sound, digital cameras and sensors to map the site and wireless gear to communicate with each other."
  • Shoebox-sized Robots Deployed in Rescue Effort at Ground Zero - Graduate students and the experimental robots they helped to develop were among the early responders who joined the search and rescue efforts shortly after the Sept. 11 collapse of the World Trade Center towers. By Peter West. NSF Discovery (March 24, 2004).
  • Search-and-Rescue Robots Tested at New York Disaster Site. By Bijal P. Trivedi. National Geographic Today (September 14, 2001). "Three experimental robots, each about the size of a shoebox, are being used to search for victims in the mountain of rubble that was once the World Trade Center in New York City. Researcher Robin Murphy and three of her graduate students have been clambering over the jagged piles of debris - powdered concrete and twisted steel - with the camera-carrying robots, lowering them into voids that are inaccessible to people, dogs, and other cameras involved in the search for bodies."

Disaster game to the rescue - A computer program in the works for training would allow L.A. fire officials to simulate responses with more efficiency. By Nick Green. The Daily Breeze (March 6, 2006). "'It's so costly to have large exercises,' said Capt. Ron Roemer, a San Pedro resident who is one of three Los Angeles Fire Department officials in charge of the regional training unit. At the same time, the limitations associated with simulations planned on a piece of paper can undermine a drill's authenticity. But what if you could design what is essentially a sophisticated video game as a training device instead? Using artificial intelligence, a computer program acting on its own could dictate the elements of the disaster scenario based upon set parameters within a 3-D environment. No need for the clumsy make-believe scenario of today. What artificial intelligence experts dub 'autonomous software agents' -- programs embedded within the overall simulation -- would dictate how it plays out. For instance, software dictates how fire propagates and which buildings 'burn' based on such variables as wind speed, the type of structural materials and street widths. ... It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the day of creating realistic simulated macro-disasters on a citywide scale is drawing near. Rancho Palos Verdes resident Milind Tambe, an associate professor in the USC Department of Computer Science, is leading a computer-modeling effort to create just such a program in conjunction with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Funding comes from USC-based CREATE -- the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events -- the first university center in the nation backed by money from the Department of Homeland Security. The idea behind CREATE is to develop tools emergency responders can use to protect lives and property in the aftermath of a disaster such as a major terrorist strike. The simulation Tambe is creating along with doctoral student Nathan Schurr is an outgrowth of a competition for computer science geeks dubbed RoboCup."

A Growing Intelligence Around Earth. Science@NASA (October 26, 2006). "EO-1 [Earth Observing 1] is a new breed of satellite that can think for itself. 'We programmed it to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action,' [Steve] Chien explains. EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash-floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice -- in short, anything unexpected. Is this real intelligence? 'Absolutely,' he says. EO-1 passes the basic test: 'If you put the system in a box and look at it from the outside, without knowing how the decisions are made, would you say the system is intelligent?' Chien thinks so. And now the intelligence is growing. 'We're teaching EO-1 to use sensors on other satellites. ...'"

Robot leads way into fiery eastern Kentucky coal mine. By Roger Alford. Associated Press / available from Jacksonville.com (March 3, 2005). "A robot led the way into an eastern Kentucky coal mine that had been belching acrid smoke and heat, making the underground passage uninhabitable for several days. The robot maneuvered through the dark portals, which had been deprived of oxygen in an effort to smother the fire, aiming onboard lights and cameras in all directions, scanning for flames, monitoring for explosive methane gas, and looking for rocks cracked and loosened by the heat. The exercise marked the first time a robot was ever sent into a coal mine ahead of humans to make sure conditions were safe, said John Correll, assistant director of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. 'The conditions could have been very, very hazardous,' Correll said. 'We didn't have to send humans in there, because we had the robot.' ... Could the robot, dubbed V-2, be the first of a long line of such machines working in underground coal mines? ..."

• Also see this related story (and photo) from MSHA (March 2, 2005).

Rock climbing robot. The Engineer (January 20, 2005). "A robot able to prevent landslides, whose development involved funding from both the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been tested successfully in Italy. Roboclimber is a four tonne robot able to climb vertical slopes and drill deep holes into solid rock walls - typically the first step in the procedure to stabilise walls at risk of landslides."

Stealth underwater craft targets minefields - Autonomous technology may make mine clean-ups safer. By Mark Peplow. news @ nature.com (March 23, 2006). "An underwater craft that can seek out and destroy mines has been unveiled. The sub, dubbed Talisman, relies on computer software that allows it to complete its mission without being guided by an operator. ... The Talisman craft is a prototype to demonstrate how autonomous technology developed for land and aerial vehicles can also be used underwater, says Andy Tonge, manager of BAE Systems' UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) project in Waterlooville, UK, which developed the sub. They hope to create a market for the vehicles by convincing military customers that it could save them time, equipment, and even lives."

Smart Robot Pet Tricks - Tap into a mechanical dog’s brain and give it whatever personality you like. By Steven Johnson. Discover (February 2004; Vol. 25 No. 02). "Not all of the personality swapping is frivolous. One of Sony’s goals in providing programmers with the tools to modify AIBO was to encourage academic institutions exploring artificial intelligence and robotics to use the 'dog' as a research platform. Last spring Carnegie Mellon hosted the first annual RoboCup American Open, in which teams composed of four AIBOs competed in a canine version of soccer, kicking their beloved pink ball across an Astroturf table outfitted with goals at either end. ... AIBOs playing soccer is just the beginning. Natalie Jeremijenko, a design engineer, wants to go one step further and release computerized canines into the wild. In her Feral Robots project, Jeremijenko and a research team from Yale ... equipped them with customized processors and sensors that detect contamination levels in reclaimed landfills, urban parks, and various other public spaces. In addition, the sniffer dogs follow special 'pack behavior' rules as they explore these spaces.... "

• Also see this related story: Man's best metallic friend - Robotic dogs sniff out toxins. By Stephen Singer. Associated Press / available from the Houston Chronicle (February 10, 2004). "They sniff, wag their tails, fetch and run in packs. But no one minds if these canines stick their noses into some pretty dirty stuff. That's because they are robotic dogs, modified by engineering students at Yale University to sniff out toxic materials."

Detecting bioterrorism - Software could help distinguish anthrax outbreaks from flu. By David Talbot. Technology Review (December 2001). "With airborne-pathogen detectors still in the lab, just realizing that an attack is under way could take precious time. So computer scientists are developing warning systems to spot early indicators of a biological attack, from troubling trends in patient symptoms to increases in school absenteeism. Known as bio-surveillance, the field aims to use data-mining techniques to recognize an epidemic days before the first cases are confirmed, says Kenneth Mandl, a pediatric emergency physician and informatics researcher at Children's Hospital Boston. Mandl and colleagues at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science have devised a computerized tracking system that uses emergency-room intake information to monitor the frequency of rashes, fevers, coughs and intestinal problems, symptoms associated with common ailments that would appear in uncommonly large numbers in the event of a deadly biological attack."

Pool watch - Lifeguards could save more lives with the help of artificial intelligence. New Scientist (March 24, 2001; Issue 2283). "Now a French company has developed an artificial intelligence system called Poseidon that sounds the alarm when it sees someone in danger of drowning.When a swimmer sinks towards the bottom of the pool, the new system sends an alarm signal to a poolside monitoring station and a lifeguard's pager. ... Poseidon keeps watch through a network of underwater and overhead video cameras. AI software analyses the images to work out swimmers' trajectories."

• Visit the web site of The Poseidon System: "an intelligent system that uses proprietary computer vision technology to provide constant surveillance of the pool and monitor the trajectories of swimmers."
• ... and see these articles:
  • Computer alert for drowning girl. BBC News (August 31, 2005). "A 10-year-old girl has been saved from drowning by a computer system designed to raise the alarm when swimmers get into difficulties. ... The £65,000 system, called Poseidon, detected her on the pool floor and sounded the alarm. A lifeguard pulled her out and she recovered in hospital. It is thought to be the first such rescue in the UK. ... Gwynedd County Council leisure officer Brian Evans said: 'We feel as though the system has saved this little girl's life. The pool at the time was very busy. The lifeguards were at full stretch. We can say the extra pair of eyes identified her.' He said the computer identified the girl as being in distress within 10 seconds of her slipping under the water."
  • Computer system said to help stop drowning. By Ed Frauenheim. CNET News.com (January 31, 2005). "A man swimming in a pool near Paris almost drowned last week but was rescued with the help of a computer vision surveillance system, the maker of the system said. The Poseidon drowning-detection system also helped lifeguards save the life of a teenager in France who nearly drowned in 2000, and last year it helped lifeguards in Germany rescue an elderly man who nearly drowned after a heart attack, said Poseidon's maker, Vision IQ. ... Poseidon is a computer vision surveillance system designed to recognize texture, volume and movement within a pool."

The Winners Are... By Michael Totty. The Wall Street Journal (September 11, 2006). "For [The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation contest] awards, now in their sixth year, judges considered novel technologies from around the world in several categories: medicine and medical devices, wireless, security, consumer electronics, semiconductors and others. A Wall Street Journal editor initially screened more than 600 applications. The judges then considered 121 of the entries, selecting 12 category winners and 37 runners-up. ... Here are the winners in the 12 industry categories: ... SECURITY (FACILITIES): AxonX LLC, of Sparks, Md., won for a security-camera system that uses artificial-intelligence software to detect and identify smoke and fire in large commercial buildings."

General Readings

Disaster Evacuation Support. By Christopher J. Carpenter, Christopher J. Dugan, Joseph B. Kopena, Robert N. Lass, Gaurav Naik, Duc N. Nguyen, Evan Sultanik, Pragnesh Jay Modi, and William C. Regli. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1964 - 1965. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press (2007). Abstract: "This demonstration presents an application of distributed constraint optimization and wireless networking to the task of assigning evacuees to available shelters during an emergency evacuation."

Building Bionic Noses Researchers Develop Super-Sensitive Sensors to Sniff Out Explosives. By Paul Eng. ABCNEWS.com (November 16, 2001). "The brain is patterned to remember that smell," [David Walt] says. 'We actually have thousands of cells that generate signals that are sent to the brain that figures out what it is." By mimicking that process, Walt says his detector can be trained to sniff out explosives more accurately. For instance, since the detector would know what leather and TNT 'smell' like, an explosive-ladened garment bag could be spotted by filtering out the pattern it knows for "leather smell." And since it has a database of patterns, the detector could be trained for other uses, such as detecting harmful E.Coli bacteria in food."

Quecreek Disaster inspires Course - Students Really Dig Mine-Mapping Robot Class. Red Whittaker's students design, construct and test robots to map abandoned mines and avert mining catastrophes. By Ruth Hammond. Carnegie Mellon Magazine (Spring 2003). "The students are developing not just one mine-mapping robot but three. ... Groundhog ... Ferret ... Helix."

• Robot displays mettle in mine. By Byron Spice. Post-Gazette (May 31, 2003). "As a four-wheeled robot called Groundhog crept slowly into the portal of the Mathies Mine yesterday morning, the Carnegie Mellon University researchers who developed it felt something unusual -- separation anxiety. They knew that within a few hundred feet, Groundhog would have to make a right turn as it followed the mine corridor and would no longer be in a line of sight with the portal and, thus, would be out of radio communication with them. Groundhog would be on its own. If and when it emerged from either end of a 3,500-foot-long mine corridor would depend on things the machine could see for itself and decisions it would make for itself."

Robot beetle detects killers beneath the soil. Jonathan Heddle on a minehunter that walks to work. The Guardian (September 9, 2004). "The team at Chiba University is led by Kenzo Nonami. 'There are almost 70 countries in the world with a land mine problem,' he says. There are estimated to be more than 100m land mines strewn across the world. In most cases, the exact location of the mines is unknown. As a result about 800 people per month are killed and 1,000 more maimed due to accidentally triggering a hidden mine. In addition the minefields cause economic damage, hampering construction and tourism. Nonami's solution is an intelligent robot with excellent vision, and a dual propulsion system; caterpillar tracks for fast movement and six insect legs for more delicate manoeuvres in the minefield."

Robots Scour WTC Wreckage. By Leander Kahney. Wired News (September 18, 2001). "Some of the robots at the WTC site appeared at this year's annual Robocup competition, held in Seattle during the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The Robocup competition includes an urban search-and-rescue obstacle course."

Trapped with Robots. By Kate Murphy. IEEE Intelligent Systems (May/June 2005; 20(3): 10-11). "Long-time participants in AAAI and IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) robotics competitions will surely remember Kate Murphy. Kate would accompany her mother, Robin, and help her demonstrate rescue robots in those events' early days. Declared the unofficial mascot of many teams, Kate also had an onstage role as the 'rescue victim' in many of her mom's demos, something she wrote about in a short book chapter she published, at age 12, and which we reproduce here with the kind permission of Academic Press.... Kate passed away on 23 January 2005 from complications of a kidney defect...." -- from James Hendler's In Memoriam which accompanies Kate's book chapter.

Team-aware Robotic Demining Agents for Military Simulation. Gita Sukthankar and Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University.

Robots Take Dangerous Jobs - New models could clear land mines or do nuclear cleanup. By Martyn Williams. PC World (April 3, 2003).

Related Resources

• Bush here today to highlight spending on terrorism. By James O'Toole, Christopher Snowbeck and Bill Heltzel. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 5, 2002).
• And you can even read the text of the speech that President Bush delivered.

"CRASAR [Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue] is a Center of Excellence operating under the auspices of NIUSR and is made up of robotics professionals from the military, industry, and academia. The Center responded with its diverse cache of robots within 6 hours to the WTC disaster with teams from Foster-Miller led by Arnis Mangolds, iRobot led by Tom Frost, SPAWAR (Navy) led by Bart Everett, and the University of South Florida led by Robin Murphy."

• Also see:
  • The video, "At WTC Search, Graduate Students Deploy Shoebox-Sized Robots - Robot 'babies' go where rescue workers and dogs cannot," made available by the National Science Foundation (NSF). [The NSF Press release is also available.]
  • In the Aftermath of September 11 - What Roboticists Learned from the Search and Rescue Efforts. AAAI Press Release (September 10, 2002). "One year ago tomorrow, Dr. Robin Murphy, Professor of Computer Science at University of South Florida, packed up search and rescue robots and graduate students from her lab, and joined other robotic specialists at Ground Zero to offer their assistance. At the recent National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Murphy reflected on their experiences at the WTC -- both what they did well and what they could have done better."
  • Robots to the rescue. By Dave Scheiber. St. Petersburg Times (March 2, 2003). "In her role as head of CRASAR, [Robin] Murphy has worked with a variety of agencies and manufacturers to expand rescue robot capabilities. Some of the work has focused on her innovation of the marsupial robot: a larger mother robot that ferries three 'baby' robots closer to the scene. These could be used in situations where large robots can't maneuver in tight spaces, but have the added battery power to transport the smaller robots (which have limited battery life) to do the job. In addition, CRASAR robots successfully demonstrated an ability to provide medical care to trapped victims. It was done at the Marine Corps' Chemical Biological Incident Response Force facility in Maryland, showing potential for robot applications in the event of a biochemical attack."

IEEE International Workshop on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics: "dedicated to identifying and solving the key issues necessary to field capable robots across a variety of challenging applications."

Multi-Robot Emergency Response Project. "Experience with robots at disaster sites suggests that useful emergency response robots must have several characteristics. From the practical mechanical point of view, they must possess basic mechanical durability, very high mobility in complex terrains, simple manipulation capabilities, and the ability to recover from errors and/or failures (such as toppling). Furthermore, teams of mobile robots must be able to gather large amount of sensory information, which is then processed and presented to remote human operators in the correct geometrical context. ... The multi-disciplinary team consists of researchers from the University of Minnesota (UMN), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)."

• Also see this related article: Teaching Robots to Herd Cats. By Michelle Delio. Wired News (April 21, 2004). Robots designed for emergency rescue work can survive a six-story drop onto collapsed, jagged concrete. They can be thrown 100 feet into a disaster site. They can even cope with poisonous chemicals, fires, freezing temperatures and floods. But, like most rugged individualists, they don't play well with others.

RoboCup-Rescue. "Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issue which involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCupRescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels involving multi-agent team work coordination, physical robotic agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive systems in future. Built upon the success of RoboCup Soccer project, we will provide forums of technical discussions and competitive evaluations for researchers and practitioners. Two projects and leagues, Simulation Project, Robotics and Infrastructure Project, Simulation League and Robot League, are concurrently proceeding at present. Integration of these activities creates digitally-empowered international rescue brigades in the future."

Robot Search and Rescue Links from the Robotic Industries Association.

"The Search & Rescue project has two principal objectives: 1.to develop a generic approach, with appropriate tools to assist in reliable capture of knowledge related to planning, scheduling and resource allocation in the search & rescued domain, 2.to validate the approach by building a demonstrator system. The project was undertaken by AIAI and the AI Group at the University of Nottingham."

The SERGISAI project [SEismic Risk evaluation through integrated use of Geographical Information Systems and Artificial Intelligence techniques]. Gaetano Zonno, Project Coordinator. "In the last years there has been a growing concern in the scientific community working on seismic risk regarding the need for widening the scope of risk studies, in order to achieve a better understanding not only of the physical direct damage due to earthquakes, but also of the comprehensive response of a system at different scales. Another important issue should be to improve the communication between the scientific community and the end-users: i.e., public administrations and decision makers. To attempt the achievement of those objectives, the SERGISAI project developed a computer prototype where a complete methodology for seismic risk assessment has been implemented."

Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest. "Founded in 1994 by Jake Mendelssohn and moved to Trinity College in 1995, the Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest has grown every year and gained worldwide involvement with people of all ages and affiliations."

URBIE. "This urban robot (Urbie) is a joint effort of JPL, IS Robotics, the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Southern California Robotics Research Laboratory. Although Urbie's initial purpose is mobile military reconnaissance in city terrain, many of its features will also make it useful to police, emergency and rescue personnel. The robot is rugged and well-suited for hostile environments and its autonomy lends Urbie to applications that involve dangerous situations. Such robots could investigate urban environments contaminated with radiation, biological warfare, or chemical spills." Visit their site and see URBIE in action!

Smarter ways to Tackle Disasters. CSIRO [Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] Media Release (December 30, 1998). "'Computer maps and models are already used by specialists in disaster recovery and control but computers will probably do much more in the future.' Researchers are developing ways to make computers reason about strategies, learn from past experience and advise on particular courses of action given a particular situation, even if there are many unknowns, Mr Prokopenko says. 'Simulating bushfire fighting, however, is much more complex than computer chess, an artificial intelligence application we are all familiar with. Emergencies see many people and resources working together in a complex and changing situation,' Mr Prokopenko says. The researchers are developing their skills and testing new technologies by playing RoboCup, a computer soccer simulation that pits robotic or software teams against each other. RoboCup was developed by international artificial intelligence experts."

Related AITopics Pages

• Artificial Noses
• Autonomous Vehicles
• Data Mining
• Pattern Recognition
• Public Health & Welfare
• Robots
• Vision

Other References Offline

Rescue Droids Stumble in an Urban Jungle. By Mark Sincell. Science Magazine. Volume 289, Number 5481 (August 11, 2000), p. 846. (Some viewers may incur a fee to view this article. The robot contest is also discussed in another article from AP.) "[F]our teams of engineers fielded mechanical contestants in the first annual urban ruin search-and-rescue competition--a simulated catastrophe created to test intelligent lifesaving robots that may one day lead rescuers to people trapped in the precarious rubble of collapsed buildings."