Active and mediated opportunistic cooperation between an unmanned aerial vehicle and an unmanned ground vehicle

A 2012 hazardous materials field exercise identified two types of opportunistic cooperation between a small UAV and UGV, the impact on the human-robot interaction, and provided practical advice for coordinating UAV-UGV teams that have not worked together. UAV-UGV cooperation research assumes that the cooperation is planned, while the use of unmanned systems for disasters suggests that the cooperation will be spontaneous. The 2012 field exercise tracked how emergency response professionals used an AirRobot 100B UAV and Packbot 510 UGV to gather information about a simulated chemical train car derailment and collateral damage. The expectation had been to use the UAV and UGV independently but the robots were used cooperatively for object-based task with coordination by the Incident Command staff (opportunistic mediated cooperation) and then for a robot-based task with direct coordination between the UAV and UGV teams (opportunistic active cooperation). These two new forms of cooperative heterogeneous teams introduced human-robot interaction bottlenecks, but overall the teaming allowed the robots to meet the mission objectives faster.