An Agent-Based Approach to Balancing Teleoperation and Autonomy for Robotic Search and Rescue

In highly complex domains such as disaster rescue, today’s mobile robots simply do not have the ability to perform successfully on their own. Human teleoperation is strongly relied upon, but this also has problems: humans suffer from cognitive overload and have difficulties in constructing a representation of the space around a robot given information from its senses. In this paper we describe an approach to multi-robot control for such environments that focuses on combining the limited abilities of modern autonomous control systems together with human control. At the center of this approach is a pair of software agents running on each robot: one to recognize problems in the environment from the perspective of a robot, and another to mediate the interaction between a robot and a human controller. The intent of this approach is to allow a human to better control a team of robots, being interrupted only when the situation demands. We describe the implementation of this approach using simulated Pioneer robots, and evaluate the approach in comparison to autonomous and teleoperated mobile robots in a rescue domain.