Navigating Real-World Complexity: A Multi-Medium System for Heterogeneous Robot Teams and Multi-Stakeholder Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Real-world robot system deployment is often performed in complex and unstructured environments. These complex environments coupled with multi-faceted global tasks often lead to complicated stakeholder structures, making designing for these environments extremely challenging. Magnifying this difficulty, tasks performed in these environments often cannot be accomplished by a single robot or even single robot type because of the broad range of needs and psychical constraints of the robots. In these cases, heterogeneous robot teams may need to be coupled to human team members to perform the global tasks. From a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) perspective, this increases the complexity of designing and deploying the system significantly, as now complicated stakeholder structures are mixed with complex robot teams. This paper presents a novel real-world system and interface design leveraging multiple mediums to balance stakeholder needs. To this end, the UI presented here incorporates features that support shared mental models (SMMs), trust establishment and development, and utilizes a centralized data distribution architecture to improve team performance. In addition to the interface, this paper presents a detailed look at the design process and the lessons learned from the perspective of a multi-year, real-world deployed system, as part of a large European project consisting of 21 partners from varying countries and backgrounds.