A HMI supporting adjustable autonomy of rescue robots

Abstract

Human rescue workers are a scarce resource at disaster sites. But it is still a long way to go before fully autonomous rescue robots will be fieldable. The usefulness of rescue robots will hence strongly depend on the availability of user interfaces that enable a single first responder to operate a whole set of robots. For this challenge, it is important to preprocess and streamline the immense data flow from the robots and to assist the operator as much as possible in the processes of controlling the robots. This paper introduces an adaptive graphical interface supporting adjustable autonomy of rescue robots. The design is based on insights from the literature in this field where intensive surveys of the actual needs in this domain were compiled