Persistent robot-assisted disaster response

We report on a field exercise in which a team of human fire-fighters used robots to enact a realistic disaster response mission in an industrial environment. In this exercise we evaluated the technical working of an integrated robotic system and gained insights concerning the manner in which robots and information streams can be utilized...

Workshop on longitudinal human-robot teaming

As robots that share working and living environments with humans proliferate, human-robot teamwork (HRT) is becoming more relevant every day. By necessity, these HRT dynamics develop over time, as HRT can hardly happen only in the moment. What theories, algorithms, tools, computational models and design methodologies enable effective and safe...

Multimodal Interaction leveraging non-expert coverage extensions: DR 4.3

The present report describes the work carried out in the third project year regarding Natural Multimodal Interaction. It summarises the Deliverable D4.3: “Natural Multimodal Interaction leveraging non-expert coverage ex-tensions”. In year 3, many additional functionalities have been added to the overall system, which are also supported by...

Incremental development of large-scale human-robot teamwork in disaster response environments

We report on the latest large-scale disaster-response exercise conducted by our project, which involves a robotic system with both ground robots (UGVs) and aerial robots (UAVs). In particularly, we focus on aspects related to Human-Robot teaming, and the uptake of new technology by end-users. © 2017 Authors. ACM SIGAI; ACM SIGCHI; IEEE Robotics...

Exploring the ethical landscape of robot-assisted Search and Rescue

As robots are increasingly used in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions, it becomes highly relevant to study how SAR robots can be developed and deployed in a responsible way. In contrast to some other robot application domains, e.g. military and healthcare, the ethics of robot-assisted SAR are relatively under examined. This paper aims to fill this...

Human-Robot Teamwork in USAR Environments: The TRADR Project

The TRADR project aims at developing methods and models for human-robot teamwork, enabling robots to operate in search and 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....

Towards Long-Term Social Child-Robot Interaction: Using Multi-Activity Switching to Engage Young Users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of...

Designing, developing, and deploying systems to support human-robot teams in disaster response

This paper describes our experience in designing, developing and deploying systems for supporting human-robot teams during disaster response. It is based on R&D performed in the EU-funded project NIFTi. NIFTi aimed at building intelligent, collaborative robots that could work together with humans in exploring a disaster site, to make a...