The San Jose McEnery Convention Center looked like a bomb had hit it.
Amid collapsed walls and debris, arms and legs of survivors waved through the rubble. The body parts were artificial. But they were the most important component of a mock disaster area set up at an artificial intelligence conference in late July. Groups of small robots, some only about a foot high, rumbled over the wreckage on a mission to learn how to save lives.
The robots had to negotiate the debris, find bodies that generated heat and communicate their location. Some robots were equipped with microphones to record sound, digital cameras and sensors to map the site and wireless gear to communicate with each other.
A large screen showed a map generated by the robots as they went slowly around the course. Some of the bots came equipped with software programs that recognized the appearance of a human body. If they approached an injured person the map would alert rescue workers.
Robotics researchers are focusing on using small robots to venture where humans cannot go to search for survivors of earthquakes, collapsed mines and other disasters.
"Search and rescue is one opportunity we are pursuing," said Mark Yim, manager of smart electronics mechanical systems at the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. One PARC entry, developed by researchers and a team of high school students, was a serpentlike robot named Gretel.
PARC designed the robot out of a set of bendable modules that can weave in and out of narrow, hard-to-get-to spaces. Gretel was controlled by a tether while some of the other robots roamed around on their own.
During the final competition, the PARC serpent became stuck amid tree bark and rubble and had to be picked up and moved by hand.
Robots developed by a Swarthmore College team fared better. Resembling a vacuum cleaner that had been topped with cameras and microphones, a small group of the bots slowly whirred around parts of the obstacle course, finding more victims than the other robots.
"This gives the public an understanding of what robots are," said Bill Smart, an assistant professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
Smart said it is tougher to persuade rescue workers in real disaster situations to experiment with robots.
"I know lots of firefighters are very excited about this. But there is an institutional reluctance. They want something that works."
Robin Murphy, who heads the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida, took robots to the World Trade Center disaster area after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
She received permission from the city and the state of New York and made it to the site by 9 a.m. the next day. Murphy's robots, which look like minitanks on tracks, searched for victims as well as for paths through the rubble. Rescue workers also deployed the bots to determine the structural integrity of damaged buildings.
"There were no survivors to be found," Murphy said. "They did help find bodies... . They were able to say, 'This area has been searched, this is a hole that has been opened up.' "
"Overall, I think the main good they did was they got the rescue community to see what the technology could be."
Bill Smart, Assistant professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis
