Robotics for Disaster Relief

Firefighting is a dangerous occupation and several firefighters die in the line of duty every year around the United States. It is important to do all that we can to mitigate these losses. One such method is to develop tools to aid supervisory personnel at the site of a firefighting incident. The goal of this project was to develop a user interface that would help visualize data that is made available to firefighters through devices and sensors that they have on them as well as the data from potential robots that are part of such operations. Our interface aggregates observations made in studies ranging from human-computer-interaction to search-and-rescue with respect to user interface design elements. We also make recommendations for the development of a fully-working user interface