This paper describes the implementation of a novel real time robot audition system which combines a 3D sound localisation system and a voice characterisation (VC) system. The localisation system employs a 4 microphone array and uses the time delay estimation method. Accuracy is improved through the use of a correlation confidence threshold and a median filter. The VC system, which classifies between speech, non speech and silence, uses a decision tree classifier and a feature set comprising MFCCs, mean MFCCs and variance in MFCCs. The complete system has a processing time of 0.73x real time, and a range of up to 3 m. The compact design, high accuracy, and real time processing ability makes the system and the approach well suited to robotics.

Until robots are able to autonomously navigate, carry out a mission and report back to base, effective human-robot interfaces will be an integral part of any practical mobile robot system. This is especially the case for robot-assisted Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). Unfamiliar and unstructured environments, unreliable communications and many sensors combine to make the job of a human operator, and hence the interface designer challenging.This paper presents the design, implementation and deployment of a human-robot interface for the teleoperated USAR research robot, textsfCASTER. Proven HCI-based user interface design principles were adopted in order to produce an interface that was intuitive and minimised learning time while maximising effectiveness.The human-robot interface was deployed by Team CASualty in the 2005 RoboCup Rescue Robot League competition. This competition allows a wide variety of approaches to USAR research to be evaluated in a realistic environment. Despite the operator having less than one month of experience, Team CASualty came 3rd, beating teams that had far longer to train their operators. In particular, the ease with which the robot could be driven and high quality information gathered played a crucial part in Team CASualty's success. Further empirical evaluations of the system on a group of twelve users as well as members of the public further reinforce our belief that this interface is quick to learn, easy to use and effective.

Robot-assisted Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) operations benefit from having multiple robots search an area, especially if doing so does not require additional operators. However, designing a user interface that facilitates a single operator controlling many robots is challenging. In particular, the problems of situation awareness and cognitive load are amplified. This is especially the case when the robots concerned have a large number of degrees of freedom. We present a preliminary design and implementation of a user interface for a team of heterogeneous, potentially autonomous USAR robots with many degrees of freedom for both sequential and parallel operation. It extends our earlier design for a successfully deployed single-robot interface. Our design is inspired by Real-Time Strategy computer games, which must address many similar issues. The design seeks to maximise situational awareness and reduce cognitive load while allowing the operator to monitor and, if necessary, control all of the robots. Our user interface was deployed during the 2006 RoboCup Rescue Robot League where it played an important role in achieving the highest single-run scores in the preliminary rounds of the competition.