Yanco's work on intuitive human controls and environmental mapping is also applicable to robots designed to look for survivors of disasters in dangerous terrain. Her lab has created a sophisticated yet easy-to-use system to manage the rugged ATRV-Jr (known as Junior) developed by iRobot, a company that Brooks cofounded and that's behind the robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba. About knee-high and equipped with four bulky wheels and two cameras, Junior is controlled with a joystick and a keyboard. Users who don't understand the controls may damage the robot or the cameras, or fail to use them effectively--a danger that's amplified when a collision could cause rubble to collapse. So Junior needed an intuitive navigation interface.

The urban search and rescue (USAR) interface that Yanco's group developed looks like a video-game display, with five boxes on the operator's computer screen; two show the views from the robot's front and rear cameras, and the user can use a joystick to tilt or pan. A third box displays a feed from a thermal camera, which allows the user to "see" in dark or dust-filled environments. The robot also uses a laser measurement sensor (accurate at up to 80 meters) and a sonar ring (accurate at up to 2 meters) to build a map of the immediate area and any obstacles it contains. The map shows up in a gray box, with a red blob marking Junior's path, so the user can drive the robot even without visual feedback from the front and rear cameras. Another, zoomed-out version of this map in the corner of the screen shows the big picture. In tests at a simulation arena in Gaithersburg, MD, Yanco found that when the robot's controllers used the new interface, the robot bumped into things far less often than it did when they used the existing interface.

Yanco also works with a device that resembles those deployed at the World Trade Center after 9/11, the first disaster site where search-and-rescue robots were used. This smaller, resilient searcher (called VGTV, for "variable-geometry tracked vehicle") is a folding bot with three wheels on each side. The wheels, which are connected by a tread, can form a triangle or flatten in order to climb over most kinds of objects and get through tight spaces. A rotating camera allows the bot to see forward and backward, an advantage in tight corridors where it can't turn around. A long tether provides power and transmits video data collected by the robot. Yanco's group turned the interface, which originally displayed lists of numbers indicating the tilt of the camera and the shape of the robot, into a display that shows the robot's shape and path graphically. Yanco's lab is also coupling a tabletop touch screen to both the VGTVs and Junior so that users can steer the bots by moving their fingers along the video display.

"I think we're at this place where we're really going to see these robotics grow even faster than we already have," says Yanco, who has a good vantage on the field's future as chair of the annual New England "Botball" tournament for middle- and high-school students. She also cofounded the Artbotics project, which encourages high-school and college students to pursue computing through the design and construction of interactive art projects for a local museum.

When she started working with robots in the 1990s, Yanco says, researchers didn't think about actually deploying their inventions in the real world; they just hoped their robots would work the next day. But advances in computer technology and cameras have changed all that. "Now we have robots out in the field. There are robots in Iraq, Afghanistan, in houses vacuuming," she says. "I think it's been a really exciting time for robotics."