[robocup-rescue-s] Robots at Hurricane Katrina

You are all probably aware of the devastating Hurricane Katrina which made
landfall on Louisiana and Mississippi on Aug. 29. What you may not be aware
of is that there have been at least 3 uses of robots at Katrina:

Aug. 31- small fixed- and rotary-wing UAVs were used in Pearlington,
Mississippi by CRASAR (we were requested for New Orleans, but couldn't get
in)

Sept. 1- an VGTV Extreme man-packable micro robot was used by Florida Task
Force 3 (Mark Micire, owner of American Standard Robotics, is a technical
search specialist with FL-TF3) to search two structurally unsafe houses in
Biloxi

Sept. 3- current Silver Fox fixed-wing UAVs were used in New Orleans at the
behest of Rep. Curt Weldon

Although a baby-step in terms of an impact on the Katrina response, this is
a big step forward in general!

I have video data from the CRASAR and FL-TF3 runs if anyone would like it.
Plus, remember, the R4 program has 5 VGTV Extreme robots as well as small
thermal cameras to loan researchers.

Please let me know if you are aware of any other robotic deployments.

Robin

Prof. Robin R. Murphy, PhD
Director, Institute for Safety Security Rescue Technologies
home of the NSF Safety Security Rescue Research Center and Center for
Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue
University of South Florida
murphy@cse.usf.edu office: 813.974.4756
profile: http://www.time.com/time/2004/innovators/200406/murphy.html
 

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Received on Tue Sep 13 04:52:46 2005