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Reviewer: Jeffrey B. Putnam

Robots can go where people can't. They can fly, dive, and work their way into small holes, even when the atmosphere would be poisonous to humans. This makes them tempting tools for disaster response: you can fly a robot near the side of a collapsed, unstable building; you can dive a robot underwater near a fallen bridge; and you can drive a tracked robot into spaces where people just won't fit. But robots may not be ready for prime time disaster help just yet. This book covers disaster robotics from the point of view of a researcher in the field. It seems targeted primarily at such researchers and has a wealth of information on how robots have been used, the limitations involved, possible research areas, and cautions for researchers. The book consists of two introductory chapters, one of which covers known robotic deployments in disaster response, and then one chapter each for ground vehicles, aerial vehicles, and marine vehicles, and one chapter with advice on how to conduct fieldwork in the area. There is also a glossary, a list of acronyms and initialisms, and a bibliography. It is a very good read, interesting and generally well written, and is likely to prove useful to researchers and students interested in exploring the field. Researchers should pay close attention to the chapter on doing fieldwork in order to contribute to the response process rather than impeding it or annoying the responders. In particular, the information about the limitations of robots in disaster and search and rescue environments was quite revealing. There is the potential for robots to not only not assist, but instead hinder disaster response, perhaps even to the point of being safety critical, where they might actively harm victims or even responders. Robots and their support may also require more support than response teams might anticipate. The incidents described make it evident that robotics experts, response teams, and the public have seriously different expectations of what can be done with robots and what it takes to operate them effectively. It will be clear to readers that while there is great promise in the field, and while there have been some very successful deployments, disaster robotics is not quite ready for prime time yet. It seems very likely, though, that disaster operations will be increasing the use of robots despite the problems (and will in many cases find ways around the problems). There are a few (relatively minor) problems. Some things get repeated (especially information about robot deployments), in a couple of cases multiple times. The acronyms and initialisms index is not complete; authors in fields with many such terms should be sure to include even those terms that may be thought in common usage, as others not in the field may not find them so common. These should be listed even when used as part of product names. The same holds true for vocabulary. For instance, I'd not encountered the phrase “hot wash” before, despite having been a search and rescue volunteer for some years, and “mine permissible” was used a number of times without a definition. Small, grayscale printed images are often hard to interpret, especially where the natural contrast is not high and the details are small. These should be supplemented where possible with line drawings. (Interestingly, one of the problems raised about robot deployments is that the images the robot cameras send back to operators might be difficult to make out.) I'd quite like to see the author work on another book, aimed more at responders, the public, and hobbyist robot users who might want to help out, with the goal of helping the several sides to understand the constraints involved, especially if it had more incident reports and analyses. (Is there a clearinghouse of incident reports involving robots__?__) More reviews about this item: Amazon , Goodreads , BCS Online Computing Reviews Service