Fighting for robotic search and rescue

Notre Dame engineer develops vine robot to help first responders after disasters

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Isometric illustration of firefighters and emergency personnel responding to a heavily fire-damaged house with a blue roof, shattered windows, and exposed wooden frame structure.

On St. Patrick's Day in 2013, a small private plane flying into South Bend's airport lost control and crashed into a residential neighborhood.

Matt Dhoore was a young firefighter, part of the rescue team sent to a dangerous scene. First responders needed to shore up a home that had the nose of a heavy plane resting precariously in the living room.

A small aircraft crashed into a residential structure, with first responders in high-visibility vests surveying the wreckage and a South Bend Fire Department Engine 11 truck visible at the scene.

Dhoore and his team went into the basement, where jet fuel had pooled several inches deep, to brace the house and plane above them so that the search team could safely find survivors. He remembers placing a shoring pole using a special hammer that doesn’t create sparks, which could light the jet fuel and cause an explosion.

“You're pounding nails into wood and stuff's moving around you and it's loud and you're still seeing water and foam and fuel leaking,” Dhoore said. “It's one of those holy crap moments. There's a plane over our heads and we’re standing in jet fuel right now.”

A woman with long brown hair wearing a blue cardigan draws diagrams on a clear glass board with a black marker while holding paper notes.
Margaret McGuinness, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering

Dhoore, now the assistant chief at Clay Fire leading the regional search and rescue team, said a new robotic technology being developed at Notre Dame by Margaret McGuinness, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, will improve his team's safety. She is testing a flexible, extendable robot that grows like a vine and can be steered around obstacles and through narrow passageways, holding a camera on the end to show team leaders the challenges they face getting to a victim trapped under rubble.

Rescue leaders at the plane crash were concerned about the safety of the firefighters and the structural stability of the house, Dhoore said. “So they were using their cameras at the time,” he said, “and they weren't able to get 100 percent all-clears because of where the airplane was and not being able to see around it and get through all the void spaces.

“With the vine robot, we can use that before sending actual firefighters in there.”

Illustration of two firefighters wearing tan turnouts with yellow reflective stripes and red helmets; one points into the distance while the other stands with arms crossed.

How soft robots are improving search and rescue operations

McGuinness first became interested in robotics to aid human health and safety as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where her first research project centered on a robot for stroke victims. That a robot could aid recovery led her to rehabilitative and surgical robots at Stanford University and eventually soft robotics, a specialized community where one focus is improving search and rescue operations.

“Every second counts when you're trying to rescue someone who might be trapped after a building collapses,” she said. “Our robot will allow the search and rescue teams to—within minutes of arriving at a scene—localize where a person might be trapped, which will allow them to very quickly drill down into the rubble and extract them.”

Three people outdoors conduct a test with a black cylindrical Notre Dame device on concrete debris while a first responder in a white uniform watches and another woman operates a controller.
McGuinness and graduate student Ciera McFarland show Matt Dhoore how the vine robot works.

“Every second counts when you're trying to rescue someone who might be trapped after a building collapses.”

Graphic illustration of emergency medical and rescue equipment including a coiled brown rope, two red first aid kits marked with white crosses, and a red stretcher.

Urban search and rescue (SAR) teams have assisted or rescued as many as 9,500 people in a single year, such as the terrible hurricane season of 2017. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has 28 task forces around the country, responding to everything from Western wildfires to hurricanes and tornadoes or man-made disasters. There can be up to 500 building collapses annually that lead to SAR operations.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, firefighting units around the country began to organize their own regional technical rescue teams, such as the unit Dhoore joined. Teams include medics, doctors, firefighters, and specialists in rope, trench, and water rescue. Based in Clay Township in South Bend, Dhoore's team has responded to emergencies ranging from tornado damage to house collapses, even traveling to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene two years ago to assist in recovery.

McGuinness and the team of soft robot engineers in her IRIS Lab—especially graduate student Ciera McFarland—have worked closely with Dhoore's team to figure out how their vine robot can make rescue efforts safer.

“The reason this project is really exciting is that we do have great potential to have these robots be actually used in the field,” McGuinness said. “And even if they’re just used in one disaster and help save one life, I think that would really make my work worthwhile.”

Three people, including a first responder in a uniform, demonstrate a black Notre Dame robotic device on concrete rubble in an outdoor training area.
An instructor demonstrates equipment in front of a whiteboard covered in engineering diagrams while students seated around a table observe.
Close-up of a tan and black handheld electronic controller with dual joysticks resting on top of a clear equipment box with exposed wiring.
Two women work together in a research lab, with a student in a blue 'Your Research Matters' Notre Dame shirt holding a controller while the engineering professor looks on beside laboratory equipment.
A young man wearing a green Notre Dame Football shirt and a young woman in an orange top work together operating equipment at a wooden lab table.
Close-up of a black cylindrical research device featuring a gold Notre Dame Research logo, connected to tubes and wiring.

Rescue work often begins with specially trained dogs that can sniff for human presence under a rubble pile. An alert is helpful, but it doesn't tell rescue workers how deeply someone is buried or what the situation looks like.

Current tools can help but have limitations. Acoustic devices can help determine depth. The most widely used tool to figure out how to rescue a trapped survivor is a small camera on the end of a telescoping pole. The obvious problem is that a rubble pile rarely offers a straight line of access.

McGuinness solves that challenge with her vine robot, which can twist and turn and expand up to 30 feet into different spaces as it carries a camera at its tip to locate trapped humans—and provides a road map for SAR teams to figure out a rescue plan.

“The vine robot is inspired by the vine plant, and the way that the vine plant moves is that it extends its body from its tip,” she said. “The idea behind the robot is that it navigates its environment by extending from its tip, which makes it really good at getting into difficult-to-reach spaces.”

How the vine robot works

Isometric illustration of firefighters and medical responders responding to a severely fire-damaged two-story house with collapsed walls and broken windows. Small illustration of two emergency workers in safety vests and helmets operating a black cylindrical robotic device connected to a laptop on a table. Graphic illustration against a blue circular background showing two hands holding and operating a tan and black handheld electronic controller. Graphic illustration of an open gray laptop displaying a view through a dark, narrow space surrounded by wooden beams and concrete. Graphic illustration on a yellow circular background of a black cylindrical device extending a long, flexible black hose or robotic vine from its center.

The unique capabilities of the vine robot derive from a format that diverges completely from what most people imagine when they think of the metal and plastic makeup of rigid robots. Instead, her vine robot for search and rescue has these characteristics:

An inflatable fabric tube folded inside itself emerges from a base unit. The base unit uses compressed air from a separate tank to propel the tube forward. The tube uses eversion, the opposite of inversion, to fold outward and grow.

The controller connects to a computer screen that shows the video feed from the camera.

Human operators hold a joystick controller adapted from a gaming console.

The tube vine is about 4 inches in diameter and can extend up to 30 feet.

The vine can turn right or left, up or down, twisting into voids and bouncing off obstacles.

A collar on the extending tip holds a camera, and the body of the robot has acoustic sensors distributed along it.

Collected data could map a route of gaps in the debris to reach the survivor to facilitate a rescue plan.

It is less expensive than other robots because the vine tube is fabric that is cheap to replace.

Earlier in her career, McGuinness employed a vine robot prototype at an archeological site in Peru to explore previously unreachable spaces in a pre-Incan temple. More recently, she has demonstrated its effectiveness at a mock collapsed building used as a SAR training site in Massachusetts.

“There were several urban search and rescue experts on site, and they were really excited about the robot because they could see immediately that it was going to be able to get deeper into the rubble pile than their existing search camera technology,” McGuinness said.

A long white inflatable robotic tube extends deep into a low-clearance space under fallen concrete slabs and rubble.
A white inflatable robotic sleeve navigates forward across dirt and debris beneath heavy concrete structures.
Two researchers in red helmets deploy a robotic probe into a gap beneath concrete rubble at a disaster simulation site, with one monitoring a control screen and the other guiding the flexible tube into the debris.
A team of researchers and emergency responders in red and white helmets operate search robotics equipment on a pavement area near a concrete rubble pile, with reels, cables, and a control case visible in the foreground.
A white inflatable soft robotic tube extends horizontally through a narrow, dark opening beneath concrete rubble.
Illustration of a black cylindrical device with a grey band, extending a flexible tube that curves across a textured background, with two thin wires trailing from the back.

Providing real value to the disaster relief community

McGuinness and her IRIS Lab team landed at the Massachusetts training site through Nathaniel Hanson, a research scientist at MIT. The Lincoln Lab there has developed close ties with the search and rescue and military communities interested in their robotics technology.

Hanson studied computer engineering as an undergraduate student at Notre Dame, graduating in 2019. He said his research work in Jane Cleland-Huang's lab sparked his interest in designing technology solutions for first responders.

At MIT, he gravitated to working with McGuinness because he had read about her vine robot expertise in scholarly articles in the field. The relationship was complementary because her team focused on engineering advances in soft robots, while his lab specialized in other elements of robotics and had relationships with the disaster relief community.

“It's inspiring me to push the bounds of what robotics can do.”

llustration of two emergency workers in safety vests operating a vine robot system connected to a laptop on a table.

“What's really unique about Margaret is her profound desire to get her research out of the lab and ground it in real-world problems,” Hanson said. “I really like the idea that we're approaching this with a nontraditional solution. It's a complete paradigm shift from the way that things are currently done.”

Rubble piles can be “robot killers” for traditional rigid robots, Hanson said, but vine robots steer easily around the challenges. That ability, combined with enhanced sensors, can “really improve the situational awareness of first responders,” he said.

“It's inspiring me to push the bounds of what robotics can do,” Hanson said. “Our work has demonstrated that researchers—instead of chasing perfection in overly engineered, expensive systems—can contribute real value to people in need with simple, low-cost approaches.”

A researcher with long wavy hair works at a lab table, adjusting wires and clear tubing connected to a large black cylindrical mechanical device
McGuinness works on the robot base in her campus lab.
Two researchers test a vine robot outdoors on concrete slabs, with one woman adjusting wires on the black cylinder while another observes with a tablet
McFarland makes adjustments to the vine robot at Clay Fire’s training site in June.

The future of soft robotics for safety and rehabilitation

McGuinness came to Notre Dame in 2021 even though the University's robotics community was small at the time. She liked that the group was growing and well-integrated, including weekly Friday meetings where students and faculty take turns presenting about their work.

“Notre Dame's a great place to do this kind of research because Notre Dame is so interested in working on technologies that would allow us to be a force for good in the world,” she said.

Other projects McGuinness works on include a robotic exosuit with soft, air-filled “muscles” for stroke rehabilitation. Another device supports head and neck positions for ALS patients. She is also using vine robot technology to develop improved crash safety devices for vehicles.

Ciera McFarland, who received her doctoral degree in May, came to McGuinness's lab in a unique way. She actually interviewed for a role in the ROAM Lab of Patrick Wensing, an engineer who specializes in robotic exoskeleton and prosthetic devices.

McFarland said her interviews with other graduate schools in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to focus on what she could bring to their lab. Wensing was the only one to listen carefully to what she wanted to do, which led to a recommendation to work with McGuinness.

McFarland admitted that the Pixar movie Wall-E was her original inspiration, as a little girl, for wanting to design robots that go into outer space. But she learned about search and rescue technology at Penn State and became excited about the potential of vine robots to solve traditional robotic challenges.

“A legged robot has to think so carefully about where to place every foot, whereas the vine robot just got to ignore all of that through interesting design parameters,” she said. “I thought it was cool how one clever platform can skirt a bunch of the problems that plague other robots.”

Her research, which she is continuing while looking for a research position, aims to improve shape modeling algorithms and the user interface of the vine robot through testing with first responders.

Aerial view of people operating a vine robot with a handheld controller and laptop next to concrete debris.
McGuinness and McFarland watch Dhoore test the vine robot in June at a practice rubble field.

At Clay Fire's training site in June, Lieutenant Bailey Capron got first dibs on testing the vine robot in a large wooden crate with a hole in the side. He had 30 seconds to manipulate the vine tube to identify as many colored pinwheels as he could through the camera feed. He improved from locating one to three on his second try, when the visual orientation was optimized.

“It was pretty close to playing a video game,” Capron said. “It reminded me of the way you control looking around in Call of Duty.”

McFarland said additional testing and more sensors will be added over the next year, and the team hopes to have a finished product that can be sold to SAR units in two or three years.

Soft robotics is a small and growing field. McFarland said she still has to explain what a vine robot is at general robotics conferences, but the soft robotics community is very tight-knit.

“When I say it's a niche, I don’t mean that as a negative,” she said. “I mean that not many other people are doing this, and so we have an opportunity to do something that no one else is doing.”

Dhoore said he's excited to see what the Notre Dame team will produce after experimenting with the vine robot.

“In a collapsed environment, we're looking for patients,” he said. “We want to be able to identify where they're at before we send the team in and start. The vine robot will give us a more narrowed-down focus search versus just searching blindly.”

“The vine robot will give us a more narrowed-down focus search versus just searching blindly.”

Produced by the Office of Public Affairs and Communications

  • Writer: Brendan O'Shaughnessy
  • Photographer: Michael Caterina
  • Illustrator: Montse Galbany

The What Would You Fight For? campaign is supported in part by a generous gift from David and Debra Delahanty.

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