Human-Robot Teamwork in USAR Environments

Abstract

The TRADR project aims at developing methods and models for human-robot teamwork, enabling robots to operate in search & rescue environments alongside humans as teammates, rather than as tools. Through a user-centered cognitive engineering method, human-robot teamwork is analyzed, modeled, implemented and evaluated in an iterative fashion. Important is the notion of persistence: rather than treating each sortie as a separate instance for which the build-up of situation awareness and exploration starts from scratch, the objective for the TRADR project is to provide robotic support in an ongoing, fluent manner. This paper provides a short overview of important aspects for humanrobot teaming, such as human-robot teamwork coordination and joint situation awareness.

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

“…The TRADR project explored persistent human–robot disaster response, and developed methods for 3D LiDAR‐based mapping and localization (Dubé et al, ; Gawel et al, ), while focusing on the dynamics (de Greeff et al, ), ethics (Harbers, de Greeff, Kruijff‐Korbayová, Neerincx, & Hindriks, ), and management strategies (Kasper, ) of working in heterogeneous human–robot teams. The robot team was able to provide operators with a third‐person view for precise ground robot operation (Gawel, Lin, Koutros, Siegwart, & Cadena, ), and generated 3D maps of inaccessible indoor environments (Dubé et al, ; see Figure ).…”

“…This team included two UGVs with tracked locomotion, one large and one small, with complementary capabilities based on their size and sensing/actuation suites (De Cubber et al, ). TRADR (de Greeff, Hindriks, Neerincx, & Kruijff‐Korbayova, ) developed human–robot teams to permit persistent operation in disaster response scenarios and also included a tracked platform in the team. These tracked robots are upgraded‐research version of the original NiFTi robot developed by BlueBotics (BlueBotics, ).…”

Una revisión de los sistemas multi-robot: desafíos actuales para los operadores y nuevos desarrollos de interfaces

“…Sin embargo, la tendencia a futuro es que menos operadores sean capaces de controlar más robots (De Greeff et al, 2015). Para ello, algunos trabajos proponen cinco roles para los operadores (Scholtz, 2003): operador (controla directamente los robots), compañero (colabora de igual a igual con ellos para realizar las tareas), supervisor (monitoriza la misión e interviene cuando es necesario), espectador (monitoriza la misión sin intervenir en ella) y mecánico (hace ajustes físicos en los robots).…”