Polymorphic, or shape-shifting, robots can normally tackle more types of tasks than non-polymorphic robots due to their flexible morphology. Their versatility adds to the challenge of designing a human interface, however. To investigate the utility of providing awareness information about the robot's physical configuration (or "pose"), we performed a within-subjects experiment with presence or absence of pose information being the independent variable. We found that participants were more likely to tip the robot or have it ride up on obstacles when they used the display that lacked pose information and also more likely to move the robot to the highest position to become oriented. There was no significant difference in the number of times that participants bumped into obstacles, however, indicating that having more awareness of the robot's state does not affect awareness of the robots' immediate surroundings. Participants thought the display with pose information was easier to use, helped their performance and was more enjoyable than having no pose information. Future research directions point toward providing recommendations to robot operators for which pose they should change to given the terrain to be traversed.

This paper shows that the Con metric from Dempster-Shafer theory is a good indicator of sensing quality, where an increase in the conflict metric value correlates with a decrease in map quality (at p ≤ 0.05). Two sets of experiments were conducted. In one, sonar data were gathered from a Nomad 200 robot operating in typical indoor hallways. Another used sonars on an RWI Urban robot in a confined, irregular tunnel built from eight different construction materials. For each set, an occupancy grid map was built and evaluated through a quantitative comparison with the ground truth. It is expected that the results of this study will generalize not only to other sensors and multi-sensor fusion, but any application where consistency can be assumed. It also contributes a design for an inexpensive reconfigurable confined space testbed.

The World Trade Center (WTC) rescue response provided an unfortunate opportunity to study the human-robot interactions (HRI) during a real unstaged rescue for the first time. A post-hoc analysis was performed on the data collected during the response, which resulted in 17 findings on the impact of the environment and conditions on the HRI: the skills displayed and needed by robots and humans, the details of the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task, the social informatics in the USAR domain, and what information is communicated at what time. The results of this work impact the field of robotics by providing a case study for HRI in USAR drawn from an unstaged USAR effort. Eleven recommendations are made based on the findings that impact the robotics, computer science, engineering, psychology, and rescue fields. These recommendations call for group organization and user confidence studies, more research into perceptual and assistive interfaces, and formal models of the state of the robot, state of the world, and information as to what has been observed.

This paper presents findings from field trials observing human-robot interaction between certified rescue workers and two types of tactical mobile robots at a rescue training site. Data was collected on how members of a fire rescue department directed the use of two types of robots for four tasks (climbing stairs to investigate condition of upper floors, searching dark, cluttered environments with two different sensor suites, and exploring vertical voids). The prototypical workflow, the type and frequency of errors during each task, how the robot workflow compared with existing urban search and rescue (USAR) practices, and any additional information that came out during debriefing is reported for each task. Two major workflow patterns that could be partially or fully automated were identified: stairwell search and topological search. In addition, collaborative teleoperation appeared to be an important multi-robot strategy. Rescue workers rated the robots' performance superior to existing methods for searching and for exploring vertical voids, but not for stairwells.