Texas A&M University Computer Science and Engineering Raytheon Professor Dr. Robin Murphy was a keynote speaker for the RoboUniverse Conference and Expo. The conference was held May 11-13, 2015 in New York City.
Her talk was titled, "Disaster Robotics: Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Deployments," and covered the history of small unmanned ground, aerial, and marine vehicles for search and rescue and recovery operations. Included in Murphy's presentation were the lessons learned from approximately 50 reported international deployments. The 18 incidents that involved the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) were discussed in depth. These include the 9/11 World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, the Tohoku tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.
Murphy was recently honored with the ACM Humanitarian award for her work in disaster response through search and rescue robotics. She was named one of the Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers for 2015; one of the "Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company in 2011; and appeared in TIME Magazine as an Innovator in Artificial Intelligence. Murphy is an IEEE Fellow and co-founded the Technical Committee on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics and its annual conference. She also received the National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue's Eagle Award for her role in introducing ground robots at the World Trade Center disaster.
Her research interests include artificial intelligence as applied to emergency informatics, especially tactical land, sea, and air vehicles, human-robot interaction, heterogeneous teams, victim management and perceptual directed behavior-based control.
In 2008, Murphy joined the Texas A&M faculty bringing with her CRASAR and founding the TEES Center for Emergency Informatics to engage faculty in the larger issues of using new sources of information from unmanned systems, wireless networks, and social media to get the right data to the right agencies at the right time. She received her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Georgia Tech.