Balancing Robotic Teleoperation and Autonomy for Urban Search and Rescue Environments

In highly complex domains such as disaster rescue, today’s autonomous agents simply do not have the ability to perform successfully on their own: the environment is difficult to traverse and to sense accurately, time is a significant factor, and the unpredictable nature of the environment tends to preclude the ability to produce extensive plans for future activity. In this paper we describe an approach to multi-robot control for such environments that focuses on combining the limited abilities of a modern autonomous agent together with human control, in order to produce a teleautonomous system that supports blending the desires of a robot with the wishes of its human controller. We describe the implementation of this approach using simulated Pioneer robots, and evaluate the approach in comparison to autonomous and teleoperated agents in a rescue domain.