Human-robot Interaction Design: Understanding User Needs and Requirements

Goal-Directed Task Analysis is being applied to assessing the needs and requirements for developing novel techniques and tools to permit a small number of humans to supervise large robotic teams. The paper presents a preliminary overall goal hierarchy as well as a preliminary communication goal hierarchy based upon the initial analysis. This research involves working directly with the Nashville Metro Police department's Bomb Squad and the Nashville Metro Fire Department’s HAZMAT team. The focus is the assessment of actual user needs and requirements employing well-defined user centered design practices in combination with Goal-Directed Task Analysis. The resulting GoalDecision-SA structure will be employed to develop potential human-robot interaction designs for further qualitative and qualitative evaluation. The objective is to successfully integrate robots into the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive device search and rescue tasks such that the robots complement and augment the current human capabilities.