Developing a Testbed for Studying Human-Robot Interaction in Urban Search and Rescue

Abstract

We are developing simulations of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reference Test Facility for Autonomous Mobile Robots (Urban Search and Rescue) in order to develop and test our strategies for Robots-Agents-People (RAP) team coordination and control. The NIST USAR Test Facility is a standardized disaster environment consisting of three scenarios of progressive difficulty: Yellow, Orange, and Red arenas. The USAR task focuses on robot behaviors, and physical interaction with standardized but disorderly rubble filled environments. As part of our research effort we are constructing and permanently housing a physical replica of the Orange arena at Carnegie Mellon University. A simulation of the Orange arena was constructed first in order to allow comparisons between simulated and real environments as soon as construction of the physical Orange Arena is completed. We hope to use the simulations to provide a testbed in which to evaluate rapidly prototyped interfaces and control strategies prior to the construction and testing of physical robots. This paper describes our simulation approach based on the use of the Unreal game engine to provide graphics and physics and simplified CAD models textured from digital photographs to model the environment.