High-level commands in human-robot interaction for search and rescue

Abstract

Successful search and rescue operations require an appropriate interaction between human users and mobile robots operating on the field. In the literature, use of waypoints for driving the robots has been identified as the main approach to trade-off between fully autonomous robotic systems, which can exclude human users from the control cycle, and completely tele-operated robotic systems, which can excessively burden human users. In this paper, we propose an intermediate level between full autonomy and waypoint guidance. Specifically, human users can issue high-level commands to the robots, like "explore along a direction" and "explore in this area", which do not explicitly specify the target locations, but introduce a bias over the autonomous target selection performed by the robots. Experimental results show that high-level commands are effective, provided that notification messages coming from the robots are filtered. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.