Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center

Abstract

The World Trade Center (WTC) rescue response provided an unfortunate opportunity to study the human-robot interactions (HRI) during a real unstaged rescue for the first time. A post-hoc analysis was performed on the data collected during the response, which resulted in 17 findings on the impact of the environment and conditions on the HRI: the skills displayed and needed by robots and humans, the details of the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task, the social informatics in the USAR domain, and what information is communicated at what time. The results of this work impact the field of robotics by providing a case study for HRI in USAR drawn from an unstaged USAR effort. Eleven recommendations are made based on the findings that impact the robotics, computer science, engineering, psychology, and rescue fields. These recommendations call for group organization and user confidence studies, more research into perceptual and assistive interfaces, and formal models of the state of the robot, state of the world, and information as to what has been observed.

Evolving interface design for robot search tasks

“…Over the past several years, there has been a growing interest in using robots to perform tasks in urban search and rescue (USAR) settings (e.g., Casper and Murphy (2003), Jacoff et al (2000), and Jacoff et al (2001)). Even the popular press has noted the role of USAR robots at disaster scenes.…”

Cooperative Vehicle Environmental Monitoring

“…Importantly, humans are capable of intelligent and adaptable decision making in response to reasoning about realworld information in real-time. Progress has been reported on humans and robots in exploration [146,147,148,149,150] and how humans work together in search tasks [151,152,153,154]. However, more work is needed to leverage what cognitive scientists understand about human decision making and behavior.…”

Local optimization of cooperative robot movements for guiding and regrouping people in a guiding mission

“…We can find some works presented by Burgard et al in the literature using a single robot leading people in exhibitions and museums [3], [7], [28], or in hospitals or acting as an assistant [6] done by Dautenhahn et al Nevertheless, the main purpose of these robots were educational or entertainment, instead of guiding groups. Casper et al presented similar applications which have been developed for evacuating emergency areas, detecting hazardous materials or offering human assistance [4], but these robots were not specifically designed for guiding people, and they do not, thus, behave in a cooperative way. Another example is the interaction with animal flocks, Vaughan presented some research where flocks automatically has been controlled by using a single robot [21], [26].…”

“…The computation of robots impact on people is done by forces that appear between robots and humans, and between humans and humans. These forces have been identified and quantified in studies of pedestrian crowds and in people evacuation [12], [24], [19], [4], [16], [23].…”