IF YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A DISASTER, IT MIGHT BE MACHINES THAT COME TO YOUR RESCUE.
Imagine you’re trapped in the wreckage of a collapsed building.
Unable to move underneath the debris, you’re forced to wait, hoping a first responder will soon pull you from the rubble. Finally, something peeks through the tangle of concrete and steel, and you ind yourself face-to-face with … a robot?
We have to contend with our fair share of disasters on our little blue planet. These calamities can range from extreme weather events like hurricanes to other naturally occurring phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Sometimes, as with explosions and bombings, the destruction is intentional — whereas, in the case of nuclear accidents, mining disasters and most wildfires, it’s simply the unfortunate side efect of human activities. Regardless of the cause, for centuries, humans have set out on search-and-rescue missions to save those let in a disaster’s wake.
But in the past few decades, robots have taken an increasingly active role in these rescue efforts. Bots have battled their way through major events like the World Trade Center attacks, hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.
These mechanical saviours can range from ground to marine to aerial vehicles — including drones that don’t just rummage through rubble for survivors, but provide reconnaissance from above. Beyond that, roboticists across the globe are building new, inventive types of rescue robots. Many projects still in development draw inspiration from the animal kingdom, mimicking designs that nature has perfected to make machines that can move through harsh environments, from droids that resemble snakes and cockroaches to a leet of autonomous bees. And while many are still years away from being used in actual crises, they point toward a future in which — contrary to much of science action, where bots bring death and destruction — it’s the robots that come to our rescue.
Pioneers in disaster robotics wanted to build bots that could go where human rescuers could not. Here, first responders wade through the rubble in the aftermath of the 2017 Mexico City earthquake.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF DISASTER ROBOTICS
Scientists began suggesting the idea of using robots for search-and-rescue operations in the 1980s. hey were driven by the prospect of bots that could operate in a range of environments, from underground tunnels to volcanic craters to the twisted maze of concrete created when buildings collapse. In short, they wanted robots that could go to places that are unreachable — or simply too dangerous — for human rescuers. “hat just seemed to be a go-to application in robotics,” says roboticist Robin Murphy, director of the Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory at Texas A&M University. But these ideas didn’t gain much traction at the time, partly because robots weren’t advanced enough yet to do the tasks being proposed.
hen, in 1995, at opposite ends of the globe, two major events made scientists take the promise of disaster robotics much more seriously: the Oklahoma City bombing and the Hanshin-awaji earthquake in Kobe, Japan.
He former reduced a significant chunk of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building to rubble and killed 168 people. he latter was among the worst quakes in Japan’s history, killing an estimated 6,400 and damaging or destroying nearly 400,000 buildings. In both instances, says Murphy, the difficulty of digging through collapsed buildings made it nearly impossible to reach those coined within. “here were most likely survivors trapped within the deep recesses,” she says. “And you just couldn’t get to them in time.” Meanwhile, roboticists across the world were working to make more agile robots that could operate in extreme environments. With those two catastrophes as catalysts, the notion of search-and-rescue robotics shited from an abstract idea into the domain of applied research. In the U.S., those.