​Robots for all aspects of infectious diseases, from health care to how individuals cope! 

In 2015 during the west Africa Ebola outbreak, the White House OSTP with multiple universities and agencies, the National Science Foundation, and the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service sponsored workshops on robotics (ground, aerial, marine).  Since Ebola didn’t turn into a global threat, at the time things didn’t progress much farther than those workshops, but there’s now a renewed and much more urgent interest in using robots to help fight infectious diseases (RoboticsForInfectiousDiseases.org group).

Dr. Robin Murphy, an IEEE Fellow and professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, in College Station, helped organize those 2014 workshops. A world-renowned expert in disaster robotics, Murphy has been directing the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) for nearly two decades, and is now working to update that experience and bring it to bear on the COVID-19 pandemic.