This talk will provide an overview of the use of robots for USAR as well as discuss what IT techniques were available at the WTC response, what was actually used, and why. It will also summarize the key lessons learned from the robotics efforts at the WTC. The lessons learned cover the areas of mobility, perceptibility, usability, and connectivity, and includes an analysis of the operator errors and failure rates. Possibly the most pervasive lesson learned is that robots for USAR must be considered from an "information technology" perspective, where platforms, sensors, control schemes, networks, interfaces, and social informatics must all be co-evolved to ensure the information extracted by the robots is truly usable by the rescue community.

Extensive video footage of the site and "robot's eye" views will be shown.

Speaker Bio:

Robin Roberson Murphy received a B.M.E. in mechanical engineering, a M.S. and Ph.D in computer science (minor: Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems) in 1980, 1989, and 1992, respectively, from Georgia Tech, where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. From 1992 to 1998, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines. Since 1998, she has been an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of South Florida with a joint appointment in Cognitive and Neural Sciences in the Department of Psychology. She is Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.

Dr. Murphy has concentrated her research on sensor fusion, distributed sensing, and fault tolerant perception for mobile robots. Her work has realized the first autonomous implementation of a class of heterogeneous mobile robot teams known as marsupial robots, creating a low computational complexity, biomimetic docking behavior. These efforts are/have been funded by DoE (RIM), DARPA (including the Tactical Mobile Robots, Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle, PerceptOR and Synergistic Cyber-Forces programs), ONR, NASA, NSF and industry, and have led to over 70 publications in the field, including the textbook Introduction to AI Robotics (MIT Press). Her preferred test domain is Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), leading to her participation in the first known use of robots for urban search and rescue at the WTC disaster. Her USAR robotics work has earned a NIUSR Eagle award, and she serves on the NIUSR Executive Board as well as Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.

Dr. Murphy is active in the robotics research and applications communities. She is recently co-chaired the DARPA/NSF Study on Human-Robot Interaction (with Dr. Erika Rogers, Cal Poly) (Dr. Rogers and Murphy are guest editing a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics on HRI), is an associate editor for IEEE Intelligent Systems, an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor Program speaker, and the first woman to serve on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (her post was RAS Society Secretary). Dr. Murphy was a member of the 1998-9 Defense Science Study Group, and is currently serving on the National Research Council Committee on Army Unmanned Vehicle Technology and the USAF Scientific Advisory Board. She is a member of the Board of Directors for Continential Divide Robotics, which provides GPS and intelligent agent software for tracking parolees. Prior to graduate work, Dr. Murphy worked in the process control industry as a software project engineer.

Dr. Murphy's laboratory and students have won the Nils Nilsson Technical Achievement Award at the 2000 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and a former graduate student, John Blitch, received the 2002 ACM Eugene Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. In addition, she has received two teaching awards and a Colorado Institute Gender Equity Excellence Award for her efforts at the college and K-12 levels in encouraging women and minorities to pursue careers in the sciences.

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