We report on a field exercise in which a team of human fire-fighters used robots to enact a realistic disaster response mission in an industrial environment. In this exercise we evaluated the technical working of an integrated robotic system and gained insights concerning the manner in which robots and information streams can be utilized effectively. We have learnt important lessons regarding the employment of human-robot teams in complex, realistic missions.@en

As robots that share working and living environments with humans proliferate, human-robot teamwork (HRT) is becoming more relevant every day. By necessity, these HRT dynamics develop over time, as HRT can hardly happen only in the moment. What theories, algorithms, tools, computational models and design methodologies enable effective and safe longitudinal human-robot teaming? To address this question, we propose a half-day workshop on longitudinal human-robot teaming. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers from a wide array of disciplines with the focus of enabling humans and robots to better work together in real-life settings and over long-term. Sessions will consist of a mix of plenary talks by invited speakers and contributed papers/posters, and will encourage discussion and exchange of ideas amongst participants by having breakout groups and a panel discussion. @en

We report on the latest large-scale disaster-response exercise conducted by our project, which involves a robotic system with both ground robots (UGVs) and aerial robots (UAVs). In particularly, we focus on aspects related to Human-Robot teaming, and the uptake of new technology by end-users@en

As robots are increasingly used in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions, it becomes highly relevant to study how SAR robots can be developed and deployed in a responsible way. In contrast to some other robot application domains, e.g. military and healthcare, the ethics of robot-assisted SAR are relatively under examined. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing and analyzing important values and value tensions of stakeholders of SAR robots. The paper describes the outcomes of several Value Assessment workshops that were conducted with rescue workers, in the context of a European research project on robot-assisted SAR (the TRADR project). The workshop outcomes are analyzed and key ethical concerns and dilemmas are identified and discussed. Several recommendations for future ethics research leading to responsible development and deployment of SAR robots are provided.@en

Conversation Fillers (CFs), such as ‘um’, ‘hmm’, and ‘ah’, may help to improve the human-robot interaction by smoothening the robot’s responses. This paper presents the design and test of such CFs – alongside iconic pensive or acknowledging gestures – for Wizard of Oz (WoZ) controlled open-ended dialogues in child-robot interactions. A controlled experiment with 26 children showed that these CFs can improve the perceived speediness, aliveness, humanness, and likability of the robot, without decreasing perceptions of intelligence,
trustworthiness, or autonomy.@en

The design of cognitive agents involves a knowledge representation (KR) to formally represent and manipulate information relevant for that agent. In practice, agent programming frameworks are dedicated to a specific KR, limiting the use of other possible ones. In this paper we address the issue of creating a flexible choice for agent programmers regarding the technology they want to use. We propose a generic interface, that provides an easy choice of KR for cognitive agents. Our proposal is governed by a number of design principles, an analysis of functional requirements that cognitive agents pose towards a KR, and the identification of various features provided by KR technologies that the interface should capture. We provide two use-cases of the interface by describing its implementation for Prolog and OWL with rules.@en

The TRADR project aims at developing methods and models for human-robot teamwork, enabling robots to operate in search & rescue environments alongside humans as teammates, rather than as tools. Through a user-centered cognitive engineering method, human-robot teamwork is analyzed, modeled, implemented and evaluated in an iterative fashion. Important is the notion of persistence: rather than treating each sortie as a separate instance for which the build-up of situation awareness and exploration starts from scratch, the objective for the TRADR project is to provide robotic support in an ongoing, fluent manner. This paper provides a short overview of important aspects for human-robot teaming, such as human-robot teamwork coordination and joint situation awareness.@en