22 In conversation | Robin Murphy scene in their van, and electricity and wireless to be available.” Murphy has to juggle fieldwork with teaching responsibilities, although they are complementary to a large extent. Fieldwork provides ample case studies through which she can discuss AI and robotics with her students, exploring what works, what doesn’t and what they think will. “And, of course, everybody likes to be helpful, so they are happy to see the home team working with the responders and, hopefully, making a positive difference,” she adds. The operation that stands out the most for Murphy in this respect is the Crandall Canyon Mine disaster, which took place in Utah in August 2007. This is not a story with a happy ending, because six miners and, later, three rescue workers were killed underground, but, for Murphy, it was important to be there in the local church with the families to explain what was being done to help their loved ones. “It made a difference to those families, or it seemed to, and I still think about them,” she says. In the search effort, boreholes were drilled down from the surface to reach areas where any survivors were expected to be. Air-sampling sensors, microphones and a small, tracked and tethered robot with a low-light camera were lowered inside the boreholes to check for signs of life. Operating conditions for the robot were difficult as it had to pass down a 22 cm borehole, slide down a pile of tailings on the floor underneath (where the drill broke through) and move through a shallow layer of groundwater mixed with drilling fluid. The robot was built for the job by Inuktun Systems and operated by PipeEye International. Don’t make things worse “Normally, I consider it unethical to bring an untried robot to the field, because you must not make things worse,” Murphy says. “At Crandall Canyon, I did so, because all of the technology existed and the company just came up with a different combination for us.” Even now, nearly 20 years later, there is still a whiff of the ad hoc about the use of ground robots for disaster response, usually involving machines donated to first-responder organisations by the military, and commitment to the technology is low. Part of the problem, Murphy observes, is that disasters are rare and specific kinds, such as those in mines, are even rarer, so there is a risk that a robot bought now will sit unused for years and nobody will be trained on it when it is needed. This happened during a couple of nuclear disasters. What’s more, the technology changes at a similar pace to that of smartphones, and operators need to keep up. “So that makes investment decisions hard.” However, with ground robots generally, institutional adoption has been glacially slow, she says. “Even after 9/11, the attitude was ‘oh well, we should have ground robots, but first we must make standards for them’, and we are still working on those standards. At some point, you’ve just got to start using them.” Disaster operations differ in many ways from regular ones. “Usually, your environment is deconstructed and unlike anything you have seen before, even if you are operating aerial or underwater vehicles,” she says. Another difference is the high operating tempo. The robot has to be up and running in about 20 minutes or you don’t get invited to the next disaster, she cautions. “It has to work, so there is a lot of pressure on the operator.” Combined with travel, long days and little sleep, this causes high levels of cognitive fatigue. Murphy is now working on the second edition of her book. She takes pride in the original’s acceptance by both academics and rescue workers, and is particularly heartened by the number of practitioners who have read and refer to it. The book includes checklists to run through before deploying them in actual situations, judgement calls on what will and won’t work, and both how to and how not to learn from operational experience. One approach that is often observed in academia, but which she cautions against, is building a mock-up of the last disaster out of cheap materials, such as plywood, which are not good facsimiles of rubble and slurries. Instead, she focuses on drawing out the fundamental characteristics of environments in which rescue robots typically operate and quantifying them. February/March 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Disasters ‘deconstruct’ environments, making the familiar unfamiliar, and adding to the challenges presented by time pressure and the lack of power and, often, communications infrastructure (Image courtesy of Texas A&M University)
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