NRI:INT: Ad-Hoc Collaborative Human-Robot Swarms

该项目解决了创建机器人和人的特设协作团队（群）的挑战，其中人不是机器人专家，并与机器人进行交互以完成紧急疏散等特设任务。该项目研究了机器人应该是什么样子，它们应该如何表现，以及它们应该如何与没有机器人经验的人互动，以确保完成整个任务。该项目的科学见解可以应用于不同的任务，如人群控制和大规模搜索任务。在这里，研究基于一系列房间和建筑物的疏散场景，机器人自主工作，提供信息和指导，并响应人们的请求和行为。该项目将影响研究人员教授的三个研究生班，将支持本科和硕士项目，其结果将被纳入旨在增加传统上在工程中代表性不足的群体的参与的活动中。 该项目在机器人的三个子领域，特别是在它们的交叉点推进知识;群体设计，自治和人类群体互动。挑战包括开发硬件平台，可以遍历和修改其环境，并允许安全的人机交互，同时保持廉价，强大和低维护。具体来说，这将涉及飞艇，以促进和提供广泛的情况意识，通过投影图像在地面上，地面机器人与充气，互动囊。对于自主性，该项目考虑了一种自上而下的方法，其中单个机器人控制是从高级任务合成的。此外，还将开发算法，使机器人能够自动修改其行为，并根据与人类的交互、人类行为和观察到的环境提供直观的反馈。该项目将有助于人机交互领域的设计和评估分布式交互，其中人类的角色在向机器人提供指令的领导者，由机器人引导的合作群体成员，反对群体指导的不合作成员和需要物理协助的被动成员之间流动变化。在各种日益复杂的环境中使用既定的指标评估人类群体行为，将为创造特设人类-机器人群体的机遇和挑战提供独特的见解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

This project addresses the challenge of creating ad-hoc collaborative teams (swarms) of robots and people, where the people are not robotics experts and are interacting with the robots to accomplish an ad-hoc task such as emergency evacuation. The project investigates what the robots should look like, how they should behave, and how they should interact with people without prior experience with robots, to make sure the overall task is accomplished. The scientific insights of this project can apply to different tasks such as crowd control and large scale search missions. Here the research is grounded in a series of room and building evacuation scenarios where robots work autonomously, provide information and guidance, and respond to people's requests and behaviors. This project will impact three graduate classes taught by the researchers, will support undergraduate and masters projects and the results will be incorporated into activities targeted at increasing the participation of groups traditionally underrepresented in engineering. This project advances knowledge in three subfields of robotics and especially at their intersection; swarm design, autonomy, and human-swarm interaction. The challenge includes development of hardware platforms that can traverse and modify their environment and permit safe human-robot interaction, while remaining inexpensive, robust, and low maintenance. Specifically, this will involve blimps to facilitate and provide broad situational awareness by projecting images on the ground, and ground robots with inflatable, interactive bladders. For autonomy, this project considers a top-down approach where individual robot control is synthesized from a high-level task. In addition, algorithms will be developed that enable robots to automatically modify their behavior and provide intuitive feedback based on interactions with humans, the humans' behaviors, and the observed environments. This project will contribute to the field of Human-Robot Interaction by designing and evaluating distributed interactions where the role of the human fluidly changes between being a leader providing instructions to the robots, a cooperative swarm member guided by the robots, an uncooperative member who acts in opposition to the swarm guidance, and a passive member who needs to be physically assisted. Evaluating the human-swarm behavior using established metrics in a variety of increasingly complex environments will provide unique insights into the opportunities and challenges of creating ad-hoc human-robot swarms.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.