About Robin Murphy
Dr. Robin Murphy
Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M

Robin Roberson Murphy is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M and directs the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and its Roboticists Without Borders program. She holds a B.M.E. in mechanical engineering, a M.S. and Ph.D in computer science in 1980, 1989, and 1992, respectively, from Georgia Tech. She has over 100 publications in artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-robot interaction including the textbook “Introduction to AI Robotics. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and serves on numerous governmental boards, including the Defense Science Board. Dr. Murphy has inserted small land, air, and marine vehicles in over a dozen events starting with the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster and including Hurricane Katrina, the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse. Most recently she assisted with the use of UAVs at Fukushima and led a joint US-Japan team using marine vehicles for search and recovery in townships north of Sendai.

Q.  As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A.  By the time I was 8 years old, I had decided to be a mechanical engineer. It was either that or nuclear physicist, but I thought being a mechanical engineer would be more useful, as I was going to live on a space station.

Q.  When did you first start building robots?

A. 1988. I had been awarded a PhD fellowship with one catch: I had to work with a professor in the CIMS program at Georgia Tech. There were only two professors in the program, one a professor who worked in an area that wasn’t that interesting to me and one a new guy, Ron Arkin, who was doing clearly crazy stuff (artificial intelligence and robots). Following Mae West’s advice, “when given a choice between two evils, I choose the one I haven’t tried before,” I went for the crazy stuff. Which wasn’t crazy after all- I fell totally in love with AI robotics and with a few months already had a publication in the area.

Q.  What do you love most about what you do?

A. I love the systems nature of it—that it involves technology, people, important tasks—all of which has never been done before.

Q.  Who were your childhood heros?

A. My hero was Gloria Brooks McNye from Heinlein’s short story “Delilah and the Space Rigger.”  Gloria is a competent, confident, ready to roll with the punches, and sassy electrical engineer. The plot centers around her being the first woman on a space station where the manager has said “no women.”  Need I say more?!

Q.  If you could live in any other time, when would that be?
 
A. The Age of Enlightenment. I took a lot of history and philosophy classes and would have loved to have witnessed the evolution of the idea of democracy into a real, formal government and to have met Thomas Jefferson.