ITR: Coordination of Heterogeneous Teams\(Humans, Agents, Robots\) for Emergency Response

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Large-scale coordination tasks are becoming increasingly important in hazardous, uncertain, and time-stressed environments such as rescue operations and disaster response. In such environments, human rescuers must rapidly make decisions while under stress and with incomplete and dynamic information, that may save or put lives at risk. The proposed multidisciplinary research is founded on three key advances/technical ideas. 1) Teams of Autonomous Agents: Cyber Agents, Robots and People (CARPs) are hybrid teams that consist of large number of these entities, distributed in space and time and varying in capability and role. (2) A cooperative control paradigm facilitates the sharing of a) common goals, b) initiatives for communication and action, c) responsibilities for coherent group activity, d) information on the environment, mission, and situation, and e) assistance to overcoming barriers for various members of CARP groups whether human, robot or cyber-agent. (3) The key challenges for team formation and coordination in large-scale, uncertain coordination domains include ad hoc interoperability across different agents, teams and organizations that are brought together "as is", and co-adaptation to each other and to changing priorities and roles within the team. The impact of having CARP technology successfully deployed will allow robots to advance beyond niche roles in a handful of industries; instead they will be integrated into the larger society of humans and information systems in the workplace. Emergency response teams are an early high-payoff test domain as robots can go places normally dangerous to humans, thus saving rescuers' and victims' lives.