FUNCTIONAL MAPPING FOR HUMAN–ROBOT COLLABORATIVE EXPLORATION1

Abstract

AbstractOur problem is one of a human–robot team exploring a previously unknown disaster scenario together. The team is building up situation awareness, gathering information about the presence and structure of specific objects of interest like victims or threats. For a robot working with a human team, there are several challenges. The robot needs to be efficient at performing it's tasks due to the time-pressure present in rescue scenarios. At the same time, the robot as a team-member needs to perform these tasks in an apparent manner to the rest of the team. Without that, human users might fail to trust the robot, which can negatively impact overall team performance. In this paper, we present an approach to the field of semantic mapping, as a subset of robotic mapping, aiming to address the problems in both efficiency (task) and apparency (team). First, we assess the situation awareness of rescue workers during a simulated USAR scenario and use this as an empirical basis to build our robot's spatial mode...