Mixed-initiative interface for human, robot, agent collaboration in urban search and rescue teams

The Virtual Synergy interface combines a three dimensional graphical interface with physical robots to allow for collaboration among multiple human researchers, simulated software agents and physical teams of multi-terrain robots for the task of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). Using the interface to communicate and monitor the robots gives the human operators the ability to function as team members, where the robots can fluidly shift from being completely independent to tele-operated. One of the goals of the Virtual Synergy project is to allow collaboration among humans, robots, and agents while at the same not overloading the users with information. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate that it does not overload the user and can improve user performance for collaborating simultaneously with multi-robots.