EAGER: Evidence-Based Model of Adoption of Robotics for Pandemics and Natural Disasters

Robotics innovations (unmanned ground, aerial, and marine systems) have been sporadically used for disaster response by emergency management agencies since 2001. Disasters pose a dilemma: on one hand, there is often an emotional urge to try anything in the hopes of coping with overwhelming potential loss of life and livelihoods; on the other hand, the poorly considered introduction of a robot into a disaster can lead to worse outcomes than doing nothing. This EArly Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) study will bring together leaders in robotics, law, emergency management, and public health with expertise in emergency management and policy to investigate robotics innovations and instances of ethical concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The result will be the first theory of responsible robotics innovation for disasters. This will transform how responders select robot technology during a disaster, ultimately saving lives, mitigating long-term environmental and health impacts, and accelerating economic recovery. The project will provide evidence for anticipatory governance, such as new regulations and policies, to accelerate the adoption of safe, effective robots during a disaster while reducing negative consequences from either deploying unsound technology or deferring deployment of technology. The project will impact how engineering, law, and policy is taught, train graduate and undergraduate students in multidisciplinary approaches to science and society, and increase the diversity of students in the research pipeline.

The multidisciplinary team will conduct a rigorous analysis, featuring structured interviews with clinical healthcare providers, public health and public safety officials worldwide who deployed robots during the pandemic in order to understand the influences on adoption. The demand analysis will be complemented by prior work in quantitatively classifying the capabilities of the robot for a use case; together these orthogonal sets of user-centric and robot-centric influences will create a novel template for describing future innovation. The project will explore the legal systems and how they adapted to the exigencies of the pandemic, especially any correlations with national policies on robotics, and investigate emergent ethical concerns. The resulting quantitative model is expected to be both prescriptive for policy and predictive for future law and science research into robotics adoption. The model will revolutionize the methodology for constructing innovation theories. It will contribute to foundational responsible innovation research and comparative law, especially how groups interpret legal uses of robotics and how robotics impacts expectations of rights and responsibilities of agencies and developers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.