Search and Rescue Robot: Rubble to ABB Tech

When a building comes down, rescuers race to find people still alive in the gaps between slabs. A search and rescue robot cannot dig anyone out, but it can look into a void before a person crawls in. This post follows the work from monks and their dogs in the Alps, through the first robots sent into the World Trade Center rubble in 2001, to the soft vine robot Notre Dame described in September 2026. It also covers what ABB's robot mapping and safety technology has in common with rescue machines, and the problems that keep robots a small part of most rescues.

Members of the UK International Search and Rescue team searching for survivors in Hatay, Turkey, after the February 2023 earthquakes. Photo: UK ISAR, FCDO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How dogs and rescuers searched the rubble before robots

For centuries the best search tool was a dog's nose. From the 17th century, St Bernard dogs at the hospice on the Great St Bernard Pass in the Swiss Alps helped monks find travellers lost in snow. Military dogs searched battlefields for wounded soldiers in the First World War, and during the London Blitz British forces used dogs to find people buried under bombed buildings. A trained dog picks up human scent, the skin flakes and oils each person sheds, even through layers of debris. Dogs still do this job today: FEMA's urban search and rescue task forces deploy dog and handler teams, and about a quarter of FEMA's dogs come from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation.

A monk with a St Bernard dog named Barry at the Great St Bernard hospice, on a postcard from about 1924. Photo: Julien frères, Geneva / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots joined the work after two disasters in 1995. The Oklahoma City bombing and the Kobe earthquake convinced Robin Murphy, then a robotics researcher, that small robots built for exploring Mars could explore under rubble instead. A centre for robot-assisted search and rescue, CRASAR, had been founded ten days before the 11 September 2001 attacks. On 12 September its team reached Ground Zero with 17 robots, some the size of a shoebox, built to squeeze into voids where dogs and people could not safely go.

Kent Olson and his dog Thunder search the World Trade Center rubble on 21 September 2001. Photo: Andrea Booher, FEMA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

At the World Trade Center the robots found the remains of more than ten victims and showed responders which routes were unsafe, but they often got stuck or broke, and getting more than about 10 feet into the pile counted as a success. Murphy later told KBTX that 9/11 "jump-started disaster robotics." Small drones followed at Hurricane Katrina in 2005, CRASAR robots went to the Crandall Canyon mine collapse in Utah in 2007, and in 2015 the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals in Pomona, California asked robots to cross rubble, clear debris and open doors.

A tracked urban search and rescue robot crosses a rubble pile during a NIST and DHS test exercise. Photo: NIST via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Vine robots, drones and cyborg insects at work now

The newest tools are softer and smaller. On 29 September 2026 the University of Notre Dame described SPROUT, an inflatable vine robot built by Margaret McGuinness's team with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It twists around obstacles and can push up to 30 feet into narrow gaps with a camera at the front, while acoustic sensors along its body help map a route through debris. The team tested it in a mock collapsed building in Massachusetts and is working with Clay Fire's regional rescue team in South Bend, Indiana.

Philippine service members practise a break and breach drill during Pacific Partnership 2026 in Tacloban City, September 2026. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Other projects go smaller still. In August 2026 researchers at the University of Queensland and UNSW reported "paraborgs", giant burrowing cockroaches fitted with electronics that let operators steer them. Some carry cameras and others a single drug syringe. In tests the injectors hit their target 95 percent of the time from within 15 centimetres, and the full navigate-and-inject task worked in 72 percent of trials. Drones are already routine at disasters, and Murphy says the next challenge is getting AI to make sense of all the images they collect.

UK search and rescue dog teams arrive in Gaziantep, Turkey, on 7 February 2023. Photo: FCDO, UK ISAR / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not build rescue robots, and I found no ABB rescue deployment, so the link here is shared technology. ABB's Flexley Mover P603 mobile robot finds its way with AI based Visual SLAM, building a map from cameras as it moves, the same problem a crawler faces inside a collapsed building. Rescue robots are also mostly driven remotely, and engineers who program industrial arms meet the same issues of camera views and control lag. On the industrial side, that planning and checking of robot motion happens in tools such as RobotStudio before a robot moves for real.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates; it finds its way with AI based Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

What comes next for rescue robots

Legged and humanoid robots are the next step researchers are testing. Team KAIST won the 2015 DARPA finals with DRC-Hubo, finishing all eight tasks in 44 minutes and 28 seconds against 24 other teams, and four-legged robots have since moved into industrial inspection. Legs can step over rubble that stops wheels and tracks. Notre Dame also sees uses for SPROUT in checking damaged buildings in conflict zones, where sending people in first is especially dangerous.

KAIST's DRC-Hubo clears a debris field at the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals in Pomona, California, June 2015. Photo: John Williams, U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

For households, the change will mostly be indirect. Few families will ever own a rescue robot, but cheap cameras, batteries and mapping chips from home robots should help bring the price of field robots down. The harder problem is contact with the victim. Murphy's group built Survivor Buddy, the first robot designed specifically to interact with trapped victims, with two-way audio, video and web streaming. A robot that reaches a trapped person needs to sense contact and stop, which is what collaborative arms such as ABB's GoFa already do in factories.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

The open problems are the same ones the World Trade Center team met. Robots still jam in debris, radio signals fade under concrete and batteries run out. Dust and water ruin electronics, a problem industrial makers solve with sealing; ABB, for example, offers arms such as the IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection against water and dust. A robot also has to justify its cost next to dogs, cameras on poles and listening devices, and someone on the team has to be trained to run it. Rescuers already drill for collapses in exercises such as Pacific Partnership 2026, held in Tacloban City in the Philippines this September. Murphy's own summary is that robots "amplify and extend the responders" rather than replace them.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

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