RSARSim: A Toolkit for Evaluating HRI in Robotic Search and Rescue Tasks

A well-designed human-robot interface (HRI) is important for the success of search and rescue operations in urban environments. Controlling multiple robotic agents increases the complexity of the human operator’s control task since the human operator’s attention has to be divided between several robots. Without a good user interface, adding more robots to the system will not necessarily increase the area that the robots can cover within a bounded period of time. In this paper, we describe our search and rescue simulation toolkit, RSARSim (Robotic Search and Rescue Simulation), for evaluating multi-robot control paradigms. RSARSim allows users to prototype example multi-robot teams using Microsoft Robotics Developers Studio and to experiment with possible user interfaces. Using RSARSim, we developed and evaluated two possible user interfaces for controlling a Robocup Rescue team---one using an Xbox 360 gamepad controller and the other based on a keyboard control paradigm.