A Closer Look At Personal Service Robots
FIGURE 4.
Inuktun
Extreme.
numbers and casualties, and to provide lighting,
water, reassuring voices, and even soothing music
until rescue is priceless. Dr. Murphy was first
turned onto rescue robots when she was a
professor of Computer Science and Engineering at
the University of South Florida. She viewed the
destruction caused by the Oklahoma City bombing
and saw the difficulty rescuers had crawling into
tight spaces within the rubble. She had received a
B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and her M.S. and
Ph.D. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, which
was the ideal educational background for robot
design.
When 9-11 attacks occurred on the World
Trade Center, she knew that her robots could go
deeper and further than human rescuers and was
on the scene within 24 hours for their first official
mission. Other rescuers were using trained dogs
and TV cameras mounted on poles, and quickly
saw the unique advantages of the Inuktuns
that could go 60 feet through smoldering
rubble. Her designs were later incorporated
into more autonomous rescue robots that
were built by American Standard Robotics and
Remotec — a subsidiary of Northrop
Grumman. She shared a Microsoft grant with
a Stanford professor to develop and refine her
survivor buddy concept.
Other world-wide disasters such as
Hurricane Katrina, the damage caused by the
Southeast Asian Tsunami of 2005, the Brazilian
mudslide, and the more recent devastating
earthquake in Haiti have shown a clear need
for these specialized robots. Newer versions
could not only communicate with potential
victims to be rescued, but deliver water, gas
masks, oxygen, bandages, medications, and
food. Larger versions could be used on the
FIGURE 5. Dr. Robin Murphy with Inuktun.
battlefield for these same functions, but also
shield soldiers under fire and retrieve wounded
ones.
Now a professor at Texas A&M, Dr. Murphy
is developing robots, and preparing and honing
them in a very unique facility. The 52-acre
Disaster City located in nearby College Station,
TX, is one wreck of a place. Figure 5 shows a
photo taken at Disaster City by Jeff Wilson of
Wired Magazine. “Created by the Texas
Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) — a
member of the Texas A&M system — the mock
community features full-scale, collapsible structures
FIGURE 6. The robot doctor — nurse
developed in New Zealand.
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