Human-Robot Teamwork in USAR Environments: the TRADR Project

Abstract

The TRADR project aims at developing methods and models for human-robot teamwork, enabling robots to operate in search & rescue environments alongside humans as teammates, rather than as tools. Through a user-centered cognitive engineering method, human-robot teamwork is analyzed, modeled, implemented and evaluated in an iterative fashion. Important is the notion of persistence: rather than treating each sortie as a separate instance for which the build-up of situation awareness and exploration starts from scratch, the objective for the TRADR project is to provide robotic support in an ongoing, fluent manner. This paper provides a short overview of important aspects for human-robot teaming, such as human-robot teamwork coordination and joint situation awareness.