Abstract:
The talk will describe our research with Stanford University and the University of South Florida on the Survivor Buddy project. The Survivor Buddy is a social robot designed to assist trapped disaster victims. The robot will be both a medium to the "outside" world and a local, independent entity devoted to the victim (e.g., a buddy). One function of the medium is to provide two-way audio communication between the survivor and the emergency response personnel, but more interesting capabilities emerge by fully exploiting web applications. A web-enabled, multi-media robot allows i) the survivor to take some control over the situation and find a soothing activity while waiting for extrication and ii) responders to support and influence the state of mind of the victim. However, our previously published reports show that victims find the small, non-anthropomorphic robots "creepy". Therefore, we are applying the heuristics developed and tested by Cindy Bethel for non-verbal, non-facial affect based on the robot's proximity to the victim to reduce the negative response. The project is funded in part by Microsoft.

Biography:
Robin R. Murphy received a B.M.E. in mechanical engineering, a M.S. and Ph.D in computer science in 1980, 1989, and 1992, respectively, from Georgia Tech, where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. She is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M. Her research interests are artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and heterogeneous teams of robots. In 2008, she was awarded the Al Aube Outstanding Contributor award by the AUVSI Foundation, for her insertion of ground, air, and sea robots for urban search and rescue (US&R) at the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Charley, and the Crandall Canyon Utah mine collapse. She is an associate editor for IEEE Intelligent Systems, a Distinguished Speaker for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and has served on numerous boards, including the Defense Science Board, USAF SAB, NSF CISE Advisory Council, and DARPA ISAT.