Analysis and design of human-robot swarm interaction in firefighting

Abstract

Abstract-In a variety of emergency settings robot assistance has been identified as highly valuable, providing remote, and thus safe, access and operation. There are many different forms of human-robot interactions, allowing a team of humans and robots to take advantage of skills of each team member. A relatively new area of research considers interactions between human and a team of robots performing as a swarm.This work is concerned with the interactive use of autonomous robots in fire emergency settings. In particular, we consider a swarm of robots that are capable of supporting and enhancing fire fighting operations co-operatively and we investigate how firefighters in the field work with such a swarm.This paper outlines some of the key characteristics of this emergency setting. It discusses possible forms of interactions with swarm robotics being examined in the GUARDIANS project. The paper addresses the use of assistive swarm robotics to support firefighters with navigation and search operations. It reports on existing firefighters operations and how humanswarm interactions are to be used during such operations. The design approaches for human-swarm interaction are described and the preliminary work in the area are outlined. The paper ends by linking current expertise with common features of emergency related interaction design.

Swarm robotics: a review from the swarm engineering perspective

“…Naghsh et al (2008) proposed an analysis of different possible approaches to humanswarm interaction, classifying them in direct human-swarm interaction, direct swarmhuman interaction, and remote interaction via base station. Podevijn et al (2012) used a Microsoft Kinect system to give commands through gestures to a swarm of robots.…”

Gesturing at Subswarms: Towards Direct Human Control of Robot Swarms

“…Although our participants seemed to achieve marginally better results with the simpler GUI, we were quite satisfied by the overall usability of our gesture-based interface, especially given that all of our participants had prior experience in using GUI-based systems, and few had prior experience in gesture control systems. 6 We believe that the minor ToT superiority of the GUI is anyway counterbalanced by the numerous advantages of a gesture-based interface. With the emergence of wireless video cameras such as the Mobile Kinect Project 7 , video camera deployment will get easier and easier.…”

“…We recruited 18 participants for this study: 6 of them were PhD students in robotics, 6 were Master students in Computer Science and 6 were non-technical people recruited from the entourage of the authors. Our participants were between 23 and 33 years old with an average age of 27.7 years (SD = 2.9).…”

“…When the device receives these messages, it analyzes them and augments the environment with a visual representation of these messages. A similar system is used in [6] where firefighters are helped in their mission by a robot swarm. The firefighters' helmets are augmented by a visual device, giving them direction information.…”

Connectivity Differences between Human Operators of Swarms and Bandwidth Limitations

“…Thus, any effort by the operator to move the swarm towards a desired goal will be misinterpreted by a robot, thus creating an intent mismatch between the human and the robot. Current human-swarm interaction (HSI) literature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] does not consider the above aspects of HSI and assumes perfect information transfer between the human and the robots. To close this gap, in this paper, we conduct controlled experiments to study the effect on performance of human-swarm intent mismatch and error in swarm state displayed to the operator in supervisory control of swarm robotic systems.…”