Revealing unexpected effects of rescue robots’ team-membership in a virtual environment

Revealing unexpected effects of rescue robots’ team-membership in a virtual environment

Horsch, C.H.G.
Smets, N.J.J.M.
Neerincx, M.A.
Cuijpers, R.H.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Intelligent Systems

2013-05-12

In urban search and rescue (USAR) situations resources are limited and workload is high. Robots that act as team players instead of tools could help in these situations. A Virtual Reality (VR) experiment was set up to test if team performance of a human-robot team increases when the robot act as such a team player. Three robot settings were tested ranging from the robot as a tool to the robot as a team player. Unexpectedly, team performance seemed to be the best for the tool condition. Two side-effects of increasing robot’s teammembership could explain this result: mental workload increased for the humans who had to work with the team-playing robot, whereas the tendency to share information was reduced between these humans. Future research should, thus, focus on team-memberships that improve communication and reduce cognitive workload.

USAR
human-robot interaction
teamwork
team performance
virtual environment
shared situation awareness
team identification

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5c5db152-7239-4e02-a8d5-e63102191e00

ISCRAM

978-3-923704-80-4

ISCRAM 2013: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Baden-Baden, Germany, 12-15 May 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)
Creative Commons CC