The CHOPIN project: Cooperation between human and rObotic teams in catastrophic incidents

Mobile robots can be an invaluable aid to human first responders (FRs) in catastrophic incidents, as they are expendable and can be used to reduce human exposure to risk in search and rescue (SaR) missions, as well as attaining a more effective response. Moreover, parallelism and robustness yielded by multi-robot systems (MRS) may be very useful in this kind of spatially distributed tasks, which are distributed in space, providing augmented situation awareness (SA). However, this requires adequate cooperative behaviors, both within MRS teams and between human and robotic teams. Collaborative context awareness between both teams is crucial to assess information utility, efficiently share information and build a common and consistent SA. This paper presents the foreseen research within the CHOPIN research project, which aims to address these scientific challenges and provide a proof of concept for the cooperation between human and robotic teams in SaR scenarios.