Exploratory Analysis of Operator: Robot Ratio in Search and Rescue Missions

Mobile robots are increasingly becoming an aid to humans in accomplishing dangerous tasks. Examples of such tasks include search and rescue missions, military missions, surveillance, scheduled operations (such as checking the reactor of a nuclear plant), and so forth. The advantage of using robots in such situations is that they accomplish high-risk task without exposing humans to danger: robots go where humans fear to tread. When dealing with robot teams for exploration missions, the human operator needs to control simultaneously multiple robots. This paradigm highly increases the difficulty of the operator task. In this paper, based on extensive experimental data, we are studying the problematic associated to the Single-Operator-Multiple-Robot Interaction. This analysis can help to ascertain the critical points in multi-robot control and supervision. We propose two autonomy management modes and analyse the optimal operator robot:ratio for each of them. The experiments have been done in a Search and Rescue scenario using USARSim.