Experience in System Design for Human-Robot Teaming in Urban Search & Rescue

Geert Kruijff (1) , Miroslav Janícek (1) , Shanker Keshavdas (1) , Benoit Larochelle (1) , Hendrik Zender (1) , Nanja Smets (2) , Tina Mioch (2) , Mark Neerincx (2) , Jurriaan van Diggelen (2) , Francis Colas (3) , Ming Liu (3) , François Pomerleau (3) , Roland Y. Siegwart (3) , Václav Hlaváč (4) , Tomáš Svoboda (4) , Tomas Petricek (4) , Michal Reinstein (4) , Karel Zimmermann (4) , Fiora Pirri (5) , Mario Gianni (5) , Panagiotis Papadakis (5) , Arnab Sinha (5) , Patrick Balmer (6) , Nicola Tomatis (6) , Rainer Worst (7) , Thorsten Linder (7) , Hartmut Surmann (7) , Varoslav Tretyakov (7) , Salvatore Corrao (8) , Sylvia Pratzler-Wanczura (9) , Markus Sulk (9)

1 DFKI - Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH = German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
2 TNO - The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research
3 ASL - Autonomous Systems Lab
4 Center for Machine Perception
5 ALCOR
6 Bluebotics
7 Fraunhofer IAIS - Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems
8 VVFF - Vigili def Fuoco
9 FDDO - Fire Department Dortmund

The paper describes experience with applying a user-centric design methodology in developing systems for human-robot teaming in Urban Search & Rescue. A human-robot team consists of several semi-autonomous robots (rovers/UGVs, microcopter/UAVs), several humans at an off-site command post (mission commander, UGV operators) and one on-site human (UAV operator). This system has been developed in close cooperation with several rescue organizations, and has been deployed in a real-life tunnel accident use case. The human-robot team jointly explores an accident site, communicating using a multi-modal team interface, and spoken dialogue. The paper describes the development of this complex socio-technical system per se, as well as recent experience in evaluating the performance of this system.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Geert Kruijff, Miroslav Janícek, Shanker Keshavdas, Benoit Larochelle, Hendrik Zender, et al.. Experience in System Design for Human-Robot Teaming in Urban Search & Rescue. 8th International Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR 2012), 2012, Matsushima, Japan. ⟨hal-01143147⟩