Haptic-Enabled Decentralized Control of a Heterogeneous Human-Robot Team for Search and Rescue in Partially-Known Environments

Teams of coordinated robots have been proven useful in several high-impact applications, including urban search and rescue (USAR) and disaster response. In this context, we present a decentralized haptic-enabled connectivity-maintenance control framework for heterogeneous human-robot teams. The proposed framework controls the coordinated motion of a team consisting of mobile robots and one human, for collaboratively achieving various exploration and SAR tasks. The human user physically becomes part of the team, moving in the same environment of the robots, while receiving rich haptic feedback about the team connectivity and the direction toward a safe path. We carried out two human subjects studies, both in simulated and real environments. Results show that the proposed approach is effective and viable in a wide range of SAR scenarios. Moreover, providing haptic feedback showed increased performance w.r.t. providing visual information only. Finally, conveying distinct feedback regarding the team connectivity and the path to follow performed better than providing the same information combined together.