CHOPIN-CCO Command Center of Operations for Search and Rescue Missions with Human and Robotic Teams

Abstract

The use of ubiquitous computing to help firefighters in the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) missions, has been studied in the Cooperation between Human and rObotic teams in catastroPhic INcidents (CHOPIN) project, with the aim of exploring cooperation between human and robotic teams in the context of these missions, decentralizing some decisions so that they can be made closer to the place to which they relate, based on existing information. In this context, this dissertation presents an architecture for the USAR mission system and develops an interface for the Command Center of Operations (”Centro de Comando de Opera¸c˜oes”) (CCO), integrating the context-aware software platform with the required tools for planning and monitoring USAR missions, leaving the detection and interpretation of data to other computing entities on the ground, thus enhancing situational awareness and establishing a common ground to support decision making of the tactical actors. The interface is developed by addressing interaction design techniques to fulfill situationawareness and human-robot interaction requirements, in order to support collaboration between human and robotic teams, thus proposing a message taxonomy to provide information interchange among agents, displaying and registering the collected data on the ground by individual agents, such as maps, locations and status of several features as victims and fire outbreaks, as well as environmental conditions in the Theatre of Operations (”Teatro de Opera¸c˜oes”) (TO) in a relational database. The overview of the operations on the ground is presented using the services provided by the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API), allowing an overall picture of the TO, existing resources and the state of the mission. The sharing of information between the CCO and agents on the ground is made via a bidirectional and asynchronous WebSocket, and is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework and a pre-defined set of messages to share information cooperatively by firefighters and robotic agents to fulfill the mission, using the format JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). The compression of transmitted information proved critical to communications with limited bandwidth and high traffic volumes, usually found in USAR scenarios.