Publication
Designing Intelligent Robots for Human-Robot Teaming in Urban Search & Rescue
Geert-Jan Kruijff; Francis Colas; Tomas Svoboda; Jurriaan van Diggelen; Patrick Balmer; Fiora Pirri; Rainer Worst
In: AAAI 2012 Spring Symposium on Designing Intelligent Robots. AAAI Spring Symposium (AAAI SSS-2012), March 26-28, Palo Alto, CA, USA, AAAI , 2012.
Abstract
The paper describes ongoing integrated research on designing intelligent robots that can assist humans in making a situation assessment during Urban Search & Rescue (USAR) mis sions. These robots (rover, microcopter) are deployed during the early phases of an emergency response. The aim is to explore those areas of the disaster hotzone which are too dan gerous or too difficult for a human to enter at that point. This requires the robots to be “intelligent” in the sense of being capable of various degrees of autonomy in acting and perceiving in the environment. At the same time, their intelligence needs to go beyond mere task-work. Robots and humans are interdependent. Human operators are dependent on these robots to provide information for a situation assessment. And robots are dependent on humans to help them operate (shared control) and perceive (shared assessment) in what are typically highly dynamic, largely unknown environments. Robots and humans need to form a team. The paper describes how various insights from robotics and Artificial Intelligence are com- bined, to develop new approaches for modeling human robot teaming. These approaches range from new forms of modeling situation awareness (to model distributed acting in dy- namic space), human robot interaction (to model communication in teams), flexible planning (to model team coordina- tion and joint action), and cognitive system design (to inte- grate different forms of functionality in a single system).