Copiloting Autonomous Multi-Robot Missions: A Game-inspired Supervisory Control Interface
This work addresses the problem of efficient human-robot teaming for deployment in hazardous, unstructured settings, representing an incremental improvement in supervisory control interfaces.
The paper tackled the challenge of human supervisory control for multi-robot systems in risky, unknown environments like the DARPA SubT Challenge, resulting in a video game-inspired interface that reduced overhead and increased exploration time.
Real-world deployment of new technology and capabilities can be daunting. The recent DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge, for instance, aimed at the advancement of robotic platforms and autonomy capabilities in three one-year development pushes. While multi-agent systems are traditionally deployed in controlled and structured environments that allow for controlled testing (e.g., warehouses), the SubT challenge targeted various types of unknown underground environments that imposed the risk of robot loss in the case of failure. In this work, we introduce a video game-inspired interface, an autonomous mission assistant, and test and deploy these using a heterogeneous multi-agent system in challenging environments. This work leads to improved human-supervisory control for a multi-agent system reducing overhead from application switching, task planning, execution, and verification while increasing available exploration time with this human-autonomy teaming platform.