Robotic search-and-rescue research snags an Early Career Program award
The U.S. Army Research Office is supporting a mechanical engineering professor’s work for detecting sound in difficult environments.
Amid the devastation of Hurricane Milton in Florida earlier this month, Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi couldn’t help but think of the project that had just helped her snag a $990,000 Early Career Program award from the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO).
An assistant professor of mechanical engineering at San Diego State University, Nili and her students are developing a technology for ground robots for use in search and rescue operations, detecting sources of sound in “cluttered” environments, such as disaster areas or buildings where walls and other obstacles divert and degrade sound signals.
It’s a promising tool in dangerous situations where cameras might not be enough to find people needing rescue. Instead, the robots would use rotating microphones to “gradually explore the environment and find their way to the sources, to the victims,” Nili said.
Nili works at a lab in one of SDSU’s most secluded locations: Building A, tucked into parking lot 16 on the northeast side of campus, bordered by Canyon Crest Drive, College Avenue and the 8 Freeway corridor. She began teaching at SDSU in August 2020 after two years at Wichita State University in Kansas.
“I liked the environment of SDSU,” she said. “It is a fast-growing institution and has a large population of Hispanic students and a very diverse environment that I value in my lab.”
Nili sees the technology she and her students are developing as useful in various settings.
Indoors, it could overcome problems caused by multiple sound sources, and the “clutter” of walls, doors and other barriers that create complexities in search and rescue. Outdoors, it could work around refraction effects that bend sound waves.
“We want to enable these robots to operate regardless of environmental factors affecting the sound waves,” she said, “or the size of the environment.”
While Nili emphasizes the robots’ use in search and rescue, she said they might also be useful in pinpointing leaks or the source of other types of equipment failures in industrial settings. “The sound of faulty equipment is sometimes different from the sound of healthy equipment,” she said.
Nili highlighted that the ARO award for this project, spread out over five years, will provide crucial funding to support doctoral, master’s and undergraduate students in conducting ground breaking research to advance robot perception.
