Robin Murphy

Disaster roboticist

faculty.cs.tamu.edu/murphy Disaster Robotics

Robin Murphy researches robots — ground, aerial and marine — that can help out during disasters.

Why you should listen

Robin Murphy imagines how robots can do tasks no human could amid scenes of disaster hard to imagine, from the World Trade Center disaster to Hurricane Katrina to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear emergency. In her recent book, Disaster Robotics, she lays out her research into the problem, which pulls together artificial intelligence, robotics and human-robot interaction.

At Texas A&M, Murphy is the director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and the Center for Emergency Informatics. She also co-founded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Technical Committee on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics and its annual conference. Her field work, combined with technology transfer and research community-building activities, led to her receiving the 2014 ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics.

Robin Murphy’s TED talk

8:59

Robin Murphy

These robots come to the rescue after a disaster

Posted Aug 2015

More news and ideas from Robin Murphy

In Brief

How small lies turn into big lies, what everyday objects tell us about inequality, and robots that lend a helping hand during disasters

November 4, 2016

Just a few of the intriguing headlines involving members of the TED community this week: The cascading effect of small lies. Tali Sharot is the senior author on a paper published in Nature Neuroscience that sheds light on the possible slippery-slope effect of telling small, self-serving lies. Using an fMRI scanning device to monitor the […]

Live from TEDWomen

Products with a story, tech with connection: The talks in Session 1 of TEDWomen 2015

May 28, 2015

Before there can be momentum, you need a spark to set it off. In the first session of TEDWomen, we hear from speakers with crackling ideas — from re-imagining an irksome weed as something useful, to helping technology sense and react to our emotions. Short recaps of these talks… A weed, transformed. The water hyacinth looks like a beautiful flower. […]