When disaster strikes.

arthquakes, hurricanes, fires, toxic spills, and terrorist attacks are examples of natural and man-made calamities that are a tragic fact of life. Emergency personnel such as firemen, paramedics, and police officers who arrive on the scene immediately after the event are referred to as first respon-ders. Their primary goals are to find and rescue survivors and to prevent damage from spreading. Their work is greatly hampered by damage to local infrastructure such as electric, gas, water, and phone lines and wireless base stations. Maps and building plans might be of limited use because of upheaval to local terrain and the collapse of buildings. First responders are also under extreme time pressure, because many injured victims might not survive long without medical assistance. Can pervasive computing technologies help? Even modest improvements in basic capabilities such as vision, navigation , and communication have the potential to be of great help to first responders. What specific forms might such help take in the future? In the April–June 2003 issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing, we published an excerpt from IT Roadmap to a Geospa-tial Future, a US National Research Council report. 1 That excerpt, " Challenges in Location-Aware Computing , " 2 presented a futuristic example from the report of how technologies relevant to pervasive computing might help in disaster recovery: A devastating earthquake, " the Big One, " has hit downtown San Francisco. A huge complex of skyscrapers built on reclaimed land has caved in. It is feared that thousands of people are trapped in the rubble. Emergency personnel have little time in which to rescue them. Although cranes and heavy earthmov-ing equipment have been put in place with amazing speed, it is not clear how the excavation should proceed. With unstable interior spaces and broken gas and electric lines, it is not clear how to excavate in a way that is fast yet will not further injure survivors. Time is ticking away and with it, hopes for survival. With few options left, the disaster-relief director decides to use an experimental, robot-based, just-in-time 3D mapping capability that was developed after the 11 September 2001 World Trade Center calamity. Thousands of small mobile robots (" mapants ") burrow into the rubble. Each robot is equipped with location sensing ability as well as visual, toxic-gas, and other sensors. The key to the speed of the just-in-time mapping application is the enormous parallelism made possible by …