RAPID: Data Collection in Collapsed Buildings from Venezuela 2026 Earthquake

This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) will support the rapid deployment of four Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers to Venezuela to collect critical empirical data on the internal structural degradation of buildings subjected to catastrophic seismic failure. On 24 June 2026, twin earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 struck northwestern and central Venezuela, resulting in widespread casualties and massive infrastructure damage. The research team will control highly articulated snake robot sensor platforms to enter and traverse compromised and collapsed structures to inspect deep void spaces. While the active location of survivors is a vital priority, the primary scientific objective of the deployment is to capture unprecedented structural data to model and analyze the exact mechanics of "pancake" structural collapses, representative of multi-story commercial and residential building failures arising from construction accidents, neglected maintenance, and major seismic events. This project will benefit society by facilitating the design and deployment of robots to save lives, either to find survivors in rubble otherwise inaccessible to humans and dogs or by reducing the need for human responders to enter unsafe areas. To ensure broad broader impacts and reproducibility, the project will fund graduate researchers to systematically curate, validate, and host these datasets in an open-access repository, thereby providing a benchmark reference asset for the global disaster robotics and structural engineering communities. It is expected to accelerate the adoption of robotics by the first responders community. Snake robots are highly articulated, versatile mechanisms designed to thread through tightly packed and cluttered volumes, such as collapsed buildings, to access locations that humans or traditional machinery cannot safely reach. The results of this deployment will support operational insights previously gained during a response to the September 2017 earthquake in Mexico, where a CMU team deployed snake robots through tiny fissures to traverse over twenty feet inside collapsed structures. These deployments represent continual progress towards the routine and practical use of snake robots in disaster response, to augment search-and-rescue dogs and human teams by delivering critical visual and auditory data from deep within potentially unstable debris. Primary data acquisition will leverage the robots' onboard high-resolution visual sensors. If operational timelines and environmental conditions permit, the sensor suite will be augmented with depth-sensing to capture complementary 3D spatial range data. Capturing data across the full lifecycle of the disaster -- spanning initial collapse response through final site recovery -- enables the empirical quantification of mission durations, post-processing timelines, and operational tempos in a severe real-world deployment. These field datasets will be directly ingested into formal analytical frameworks, previously developed under NSF and National Robotics Initiative (NRI) funding, to characterize the physics of extreme environments by evaluating metrics such as scale verticality, void tortuosity, and complex surface boundary properties. This project is supported by the cross-directorate Foundational Research in Robotics program, jointly managed and funded by the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). 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.