WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Students gathered Monday around a cardboard mockup of Washington's train station to try their hand at using robots to search for and assist terrorism victims.
The mission was to explore Union Station in the aftermath of an explosion. The teams were assembled from a collection of students, from elementary school through college, who were given a variety of modular pieces from which to create their robot. The exercise controllers threw in various complications, including having complete beginners operate the robots via laptop computers and other controls.
The student "robotics war game," and a parallel simulation where businessmen tested out solutions to rapidly move technology, are preludes to the Naval-Industry Research and Development Partnership Conference, said David Brown, a professor at the Defense Acquisition University.
The organizers specifically looked at bringing young children into the exercise because of their imagination and lack of experience with knowing what can't be done, Brown told United Press International. Combining that thinking with the applications knowledge of older students can be very enlightening, he said.
"There will be some injured people, but there might be terrorists or other threatening people that have to be discriminated from the 'friendlies,'" Brown said. "The biggest part of the challenge is (the physical) gaps in the mockup. It's not a smooth, laid-out course."
Brown ran the exercise at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in conjunction with technical experts from the University of South Florida's Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue and the New York City Police Department.
At the same time in the room next to the Union Station mockup, groups of business managers and technology developers were going through a parallel war game, focused on delivering new tools to the searchers.
"What we're looking at from the acquisition side is speeding up the development cycle -- bringing what today might be eight years down to maybe three or four years," Brown said. "There may be some very good lessons learned if you say, 'You only have three or four hours to do it,' and walk through it."
"A big part of this will be to look at interoperability between different systems built by different people from different parts of the country," Brown said. "We want to see if we can create an integrated system that can actually perform the mission."
The business war game covered such concepts as ensuring a system's software can be easily altered in the field to meet unexpected missions, said Thomas Kowalczyk, a manager at the Office of Naval Research who oversaw both simulations. The program is meant to help companies better integrate their research activities into the Department of Defense's acquisition process, he said.
"Since a significant dollar volume of the government's money is put through the industrial base, the better the industry is at finding and deploying technology, the better the government will be," Kowalczyk said.
Robin Murphy, a USF professor of computer science and engineering and CRASAR's director, opened the exercise with the center's real-world experiences in using robots in the rubble of the World Trade Center. A narrow-minded focus on "what the robot can do" hurts both technology builders and operational teams, she said.
For example, operators might think in terms of "one robot, one person" when in reality two or more people might be needed to carry the robot to a search site or possibly recover the system with ropes, Murphy said. Prior to Sept. 11, some robot makers didn't place a high priority on waterproofing their systems, thinking the robots would "only be involved in searching," she said. During the World Trade Center operations, they discovered exposure to human remains and bodily fluids required the robots to be decontaminated with water and bleach, she said.
