LCSR Seminar: Robin Murphy

Description

Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, will give a talk entitled "From the World Trade Center to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Robots and Disasters" for the Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

Learn more about the speaker online.

Abstract:

This talk will describe how ground, aerial, and marine robots have been used in disasters, most recently the coronavirus pandemic. During the pandemic so far, 338 instances of robots in 48 countries protecting healthcare workers from unnecessary exposure, handling the surge in demand for clinical care, preventing infections, restoring economic activity, and maintaining individual quality of life have been reported. The uses span six sociotechnical work domains and 29 different use cases representing different missions, robot work envelopes, and human-robot interaction dyads. The dataset also confirms a model of adoption of robotics technology for disasters. Adoption favors robots that maximize the suitability for established use cases while minimizing risk of malfunction, hidden workload costs, or unintended consequences as measured by the NASA Technical Readiness Assessment metrics. Regulations do not present a major barrier but availability, either in terms of inventory or prohibitively high costs, does. The model suggests that in order to be prepared for future events, roboticists should partner with responders now, investigate how to rapidly manufacture complex, reliable robots on demand, and conduct fundamental research on predicting and mitigating risk in extreme or novel environments.