Texas A&M's Robin Murphy has deployed robots at 29 disasters, including three building collapses, two mine disasters and an earthquake as director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. She has also served as a technical search specialist with the Hillsboro County (Florida) Fire and Rescue Department. The Conversation talked to Murphy to provide readers an understanding of the types of technologies that search and rescue crews at the Champlain Towers South disaster site in Surfside, Florida, have at their disposal, as well as some they don't. The interview has been edited for length. We don't have reports about it from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, but news coverage shows that they're using drones.

Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions a time when his insect-sized drone could be used as a search and rescue robot -- to find survivors in disaster debris that bigger drones couldn't reach. Kevin Chen, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions a time when his insect-sized drone could be used as a search and rescue robot -- to find survivors in disaster debris that bigger drones couldn't reach. The reason it's so hard to kill a mosquito is that they move really well. Scientists are trying to build a robot with that kind of agility. And these tiny but mighty flying robots could be used in life-and-death situations, such as finding people in a collapsed building.

Scientists have trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to see things the way humans do, by inferring an environment with just a few quick glimpses around, that may pave the way for more effective search-and-rescue robots. Most AI tools are trained for very specific tasks, such as to recognise an object or estimate its volume in an environment they have experienced before. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin in the US wanted to develop an AI for general purpose, gathering visual information that can then be used for a wide range of tasks. "We want an agent that is generally equipped to enter environments and be ready for new perception tasks as they arise," said Kristen Grauman, a professor at the University of Texas. "It behaves in a way that's versatile and able to succeed at different tasks because it has learned useful patterns about the visual world," Grauman said in a statement.

Computer scientists have taught an artificial intelligence agent how to take in its whole environment by just taking a few snapshots. The new technology can gather visual information that can be used for a wide range of tasks including search-and-rescue. Researchers have taught the computer system how to take quick glimpses around a room it has never seen before to create a'full scene'. The scientists used deep learning, a type of machine learning inspired by the brain's neural networks, to train their agent on thousands of 360-degree images of different environments. They say that their research could aid effective search-and-rescue missions by making robots that could relay information to authorities.

So it looks like a half-stuffed sock -- and it is, sort of -- but this sandfish-inspired search and rescue robot has the potential to change the way machines maneuver through disaster zones. Playing off its previous endeavors, a team of Georgia Tech researchers has designed a wedge-shaped head to manipulate the vertical movement of its sand-swimming invention through "complex dirt and rubble environments." By mimicking the pointy snout of the sandfish lizard, and attaching it to the body of its robot -- which sports seven servo-powered segments stuffed in a latex sock and sheathed by a spandex "swimsuit" -- the team found that subtle changes in the positioning of the robot's head made for drastic differences in vertical movement. When it was placed flat on the horizontal plane, the robot descended; when it was inclined above seven degrees, it ascended. For now, the robotic sandfish has been relegated to swimming in a sea of tiny yellow balls, but it's slated to dive into a pool of debris in the name of research soon.