ARLINGTON, Va., May 15 (UPI) -- The promise robots hold for assisting urban search and rescue operations, such as in the World Trade Center collapse, is being held up more by money issues than technological challenges, speakers said during a Wednesday conference.
The branches of government that deal directly with disasters, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would seem the obvious choice for funding USAR robotics, said John Blitch, a retired Army officer and former director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. Blitch's work includes efforts at the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the Sept. 11 aftermath in New York City.
The funding problem lies in the fact that disaster agencies focus on mitigating an event's consequences, Blitch told a session at the 2002 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
"If (the FEMA director) was caught funding research, as opposed to putting money into farmers' hands after a flood or into the infrastructure of Los Angeles after the Northridge earthquake, he'd be fired immediately," Blitch said. "Where do you get the funding then?"
The short-term answer was to look for capabilities that are useful outside of the rescue arena, Blitch said, to get the military and NASA interested.
For example, a robot that can negotiate a rocky plain on Mars or pick its way through a barbed-wire fence also should be able to deal with tangled steel and concrete in looking for disaster survivors, he said. Along the same lines, if a robot's design includes mapping a mine field or other hazardous area, that software can help rescuers plot out voids in rubble piles and determine an area's structural stability, he said.
Once funding is nailed down, developers need to keep a couple of basic rules in mind when dealing with rescue robots, Blitch said. Since human USAR specialists are more than willing to put themselves at risk, robots designed to replace them will only generate opposition, he said, so designers should concentrate on finding ways to get robots into areas impassible for humans.
The other vital thing to remember is how exhausted rescue workers get, Blitch said. Robot controls must be as simple as possible, meaning developers must handle complexities through software, he said.
Training non-robotics rescue specialists to handle the robots also must be considered, he added, especially for devices that can change their shape, something humans can have trouble conceptualizing.
Communicating with and controlling the robots are areas of particular concern going forward, Blitch said. Cables and tethers can be a liability, snagging on rubble or otherwise preventing a robot from getting where it needs to go. Ongoing U.S. military work on adaptive frequency management might help enable wireless robots, he said.
One wireless technology that could fit in with search and rescue robotics is ultrawideband, which uses low-power, short-duration transmissions over a very wide range of frequencies, as opposed to using a carrier wave in a specific band, such as with FM radio.
This approach allows UWB transmissions to carry large amounts of data through solid objects, but that does not mean the technology is perfect for USAR, said Robin Murphy, a computer science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa-St. Petersburg and director of Blitch's CRASAR group.
The rubble of disaster sites sets up interference in the form of multiple radio echoes, she told United Press International at the conference, and the through-wall capabilities work primarily at short ranges.
The range limitation is due to Federal Communications Commission rules that restrict how much power the technology can use, said Jeff Ross, vice president of corporate development at Time Domain, a UWB provider in Huntsville, Ala.
"If you're talking about sending a robot into a search and rescue area, you'll need to transmit greater distances than the types of products enabled under FCC rules," Ross told UPI in a telephone interview. "In order to get video transmissions ... you'd want to have higher power than what the FCC's authorized."
The FCC will revisit its UWB rules in the next few months, Ross said, and the commission is expected to become much more liberal in allowing the technology for public safety uses such as rescue robotics, he said. In the meantime, such robots could benefit from current "through-wall radar" products that use ultrawideband, he said.
