Robin Murphy (featured in 2013), is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in Texas A & M and Director of the non-profit Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory, (formerly known as Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). She is a distinguished Disaster Roboticist pioneering the advancement of AI and mobile robotics in unstructured and extreme environments. At CRASAR, she has been actively supplying her rescue robot since 9/11 in 2001 and has now participated in more than 30 disasters which include building collapses, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, marine mass casualty events, nuclear accidents, tsunamis, underground mine explosions, and volcanic eruptions, in five different countries. And she has developed and taught classes in robotics for emergency response and public safety for over 1,000 members of 30 agencies from seven countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing global demand for robots that can assist in surgery and healthcare. This symposium focuses on recent advances and open problems in robot-assisted tele-surgery and tele-medicine and needs for new research and development. The online format will encourage active dialogue among faculty, students, professionals, and entrepreneurs.

Three experimental robots, each about the size of a shoebox, are being used to search for victims in the mountain of rubble that was once the World Trade Center in New York City. Researcher Robin Murphy and three of her graduate students have been clambering over the jagged piles of debris powdered concrete and twisted steel with the camera-carrying robots, lowering them into voids that are inaccessible to people, dogs, and other cameras involved in the search for bodies. "So far the robots haven't found a survivor," said engineering professor Robin Murphy of the University of South Florida, who is developing the robots specifically for urban search and rescue missions. "We've only seen body parts and bloody splotches," said Murphy. "At this point we don't have much hope. We are trying to find remains so that they can be handled with dignity."