Single-human multiple-robot systems for urban search and rescue: Justifications, design and testing

The evolution of interactions between humans and robots has reached a stage close to where multiple robots can be robustly deployed. The domain of Urban Search and Rescue stands to benefit from such a capability. However, even autonomous robots must be supervised by humans. Yet, reasons such as economy, efficiency, added reliability as well as improving overall group capability and addressing payload constraints, make multiple robot deployment (MRD) an appealing possibility. Single-Human Multiple Robot Systems facilitate MRD while ensuring the supervision of robots deployed. However, the design of the single-human multiple-robot system requires consideration of key design attributes such as collective size, composition and structure as well as of the MRD issues of communication costs, computational costs, cognitive workload and situation awareness. The experiments to determine the effects of the key design attributes on the issues of MRD have been designed and are described in this paper as well.