A graphical user interface for multi-robot control in urban search and rescue applications

This paper presents a human-robot interaction (HRI) interface designed to control heterogeneous multi-robot teams for urban search and rescue (USAR) applications. The interface allows an operator to configure and create teams from a list of available robots, and also monitor and control individual robots during the search mission. The motivation behind the design of this interface is to have a user-friendly interface which allows for situational awareness of all robots in a team with the hopes of minimizing the workload of the operator when controlling multiple robots. Experiments were conducted in a USAR-like environment with operators to investigate the efficiency of the interface using multiple heterogeneous robots. The results showed that the interface was effective in aiding operators to explore an unknown cluttered environment using all robots in the team while finding the majority of victims.