Towards a human-robot teaming system for exploration of environment

Abstract

The use of robots has been proposed as promising human assistants in accomplishing tasks that are otherwise too tough or dangerous to be executed by human alone. As robots in different forms have their differentiating strengths, a system that uses a combination of these robots can be more robust and resilient in achieving its mission. For example, UAVs can be used to quickly explore an unknown environment while ground robots can be used to navigate through the environment, clearing obstacles and potential dangers for human to enter. In this work, we design a unifying framework to allow human to control and accomplish an exploration mission using heterogeneous robot types. A prototype system is implemented using the Google Tango to control an UAV and a wheeled robot for the human to perform environment mapping. Preliminary experiments have been carried out to study the feasibility of the system.