ABSTRACT

The information needs of the operator fall into several categories: infor­mation about the status of the robot, information about the robot’s environ­ment, and information about victims found in the environment. Information about the status of the robot and the robot’s environment is necessary for real-time monitoring and control or supervision of the search. The operator uses information about victim state and location to ensure coverage. In competitions, the accuracy of maps is verified by giving the in­formation to judges; in real situations, people would be sent into a building to rescue reported victims.In this analysis we have focused on the information needed by the operator to navigate the test arena and to locate victims. We looked at the interactions between the operator and one or more robots. These constraints were deter­mined by the nature of the competition and the capabilities of the teams partic­ipating in the search and rescue competition. As capabilities of robots improve we hope to see entries that have robot-robot interactions and operator-opera­tor interactions. The competition limits us to studying the operator-robot pair­ing rather than allowing us to study the larger context of an entire search and rescue team at a disaster site. For the time being, we can look to studies such as Burke, Murphy, Coovert, and Riddle (2004) for insights into HRI in the larger context of urban search and rescue.