RAPID: Extraction of Robot Use Cases for the Ebola Epidemic

该项目将与国内和国际医疗和灾害专业人员合作，提取地面、空中和海上机器人的正式用例，用于埃博拉（及未来）流行病的医疗反应和人道主义救济。迫切需要一套详细的用例，以应对这一流行病带来的挑战，并为协助应对未来的流行病准备机器人。机器人社区不能在不了解需求的情况下提供机器人，工程错误或不匹配既会造成经济上的损失，也会延迟有效解决方案的交付。这是一个与救援人员合作的难得机会，因为他们计划部署3000多名士兵和疾病控制中心的工作人员，以及可能通过无国界医生等非政府组织派遣的更多志愿者。该项目的成果将使机器人公司能够自信地预先定位/重新定位产品，并将研究结果纳入研发投资策略。问题的分类将指导学术界未来的研究，并用作激励课堂项目。机器人的有效使用将在短期内为救援人员提供工具，并将在总体上提供机器人技术可实现的期望。在医疗事件期间，没有对机器人可用于的任务进行全面说明，一般任务描述（例如，我们需要一个机器人来运输尸体）没有捕捉到机器人的设计约束。先前的研究表明，不了解操作范围、工作领域和文化会导致无法采用过于昂贵的机器人。卫生专业人员没有将机器人技术用于医疗事件的整个领域（医院、野战医疗、后勤、骚乱安全），灾难或医疗机器人社区也没有参与流行病。该项目将提供机器人如何用于医疗灾难的基本理解，并将设计一个正式的过程来预测机器人需求。将从气象、地质、人为灾害扩大到医疗灾害、外科手术机器人、远程机器人等领域的研究，突破机器人在生物安全事件中的应用界限，将有利于安全安保和救援机器人。

This project will work with national and international medical and disaster professionals to extract formal use cases for ground, aerial, and marine robots for medical response and humanitarian relief to the Ebola (and future) epidemics. A set of detailed use cases is urgently needed to meet the challenges posed by the epidemic and to prepare robotics for assisting with future epidemics. The robotics community cannot provide robots without understanding the needs and engineering mistakes or mismatches will both be financially costly and delay the delivery of effective solutions. This is a rare opportunity to work with responders as they plan for a deployment of more than 3,000 troops plus Centers for Disease Control workers, and a possibly greater number of volunteers through non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. The project outcomes will allow robotics companies to confidently pre-position/re-position products and to incorporate the findings into R&D investment strategies. The categorization of problems will guide academia in future research and to use as motivating class projects. The effective use of robots will provide responders with tools for the short term and will provide achievable expectations of robotics technology in general.There is no comprehensive statement of the missions that robots can be used for during a medical event and general mission descriptions (e.g. we need a robot to transport bodies) do not capture the design constraints on a robot. Prior work has shown that not understanding the operational envelope, work domain, and culture results in overly expensive robots that cannot be adopted. Robotics has not been considered by health professionals for the entire space of a medical event (hospitals, field medicine, logistics, security from riots), nor has the disaster or medical robotics communities been engaged with epidemics. This project will provide the fundamental understanding of how robots can be used for medical disasters and will design a formal process for projecting robotics requirements. It will benefit safety security and rescue robotics by expanding research from meteorological, geological, and man-made disasters to medical disasters and surgical robotics and telerobotics by pushing the boundaries of how robots are used for biosafety event.