Collaborative tools for mixed teams of humans and robots

This paper discusses efforts at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) to develop a control architecture for mixed teams of ground and air vehicles. Our approach has been to consider the air vehicles, ground robots and humans as team members with different levels of authority, different communication, processing, power and mobility capabilities and also different perceptual capabilities. The paper examines the current control-architecture and interface with special attention to the role of a collaborative workspace in enabling mixed-initiative interaction between humans and heterogeneous teams of robotic vehicles.