A Robotic System of Systems for Human-Robot Collaboration in Search and Rescue Operations

The progress in robot autonomy has opened up opportunities for various applications, notably in autonomous navigation and mapping missions with mobile platforms. This motivates us to exploit such technologies to develop a human-robot collaboration system. Such a system improves task efficiencies and ensures the safety of human counterparts in search and rescue operations and site surveillance missions. In this paper, we present a robotic system of systems as a strategy for human-robot teaming missions in unexplored and unstructured environments. The system comprises a single human operator and multiple custom-built aerial robots equipped with various sensors for localization, mapping, and object detection. It enables the human operator to set operation modes and assign tasks to the robots individually or as a group via a human-robot interaction device, allowing the human operator to focus on critical mission objectives and decision-making. In each operation mode, the robot(s) navigates the environment autonomously while avoiding obstacles for a given set of waypoints. Additionally, a formation planning policy has been developed for group navigation and relative poses between the human operator and robots are estimated using UWB ranging and odometry measurements to improve the human operator's IMU positioning accuracy. The robots are fitted with RGB-D cameras for object detection and real-time image streaming to the operator. Results from the deployment of the system in indoor settings are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of a human-robot collaboration system in an unknown environment.