Human-Robots Team Cooperation in Crisis Management Mission

Abstract

With technological progresses, machines such as robots are increasingly used to work on hazardous and dynamic environments. In general, robots work with humans in a team. For this reason, our research aims to improve human-robot cooperation using human-machine cooperation principles. An important aspect of cooperation is function allocation. The function allocation between human and robot is mainly managed through Levels of Automation. This current study focuses on the implementation of proposed Levels of Automation in a real application for crisis management with firefighters, where a human operator is in a command post and robots operate in a hostile environment. Results regarding the human operator situation awareness, workload and task performance during an experiment are presented.