From Ad Hoc Pilots to Repeatable Patterns: Structuring Drone Collaboration in Emergency Services with DroneLets
For emergency services and human-drone interaction researchers, this work provides a structured foundation for integrating autonomous drones into high-stakes operations, though it is an incremental extension of Collaboration Engineering to embodied agents.
The paper addresses how emergency teams collaborate with drones and formalizes these collaborations into repeatable processes. Based on four field trials and 95 interviews, it derives 44 interaction patterns grouped into 10 meta-patterns and introduces DroneLets, a modular framework for designing repeatable, scalable drone collaboration in emergency services.
Drones hold promise for supporting emergency services, but their integration into workflows remains ad hoc and coordination-intensive. This paper addresses two research questions: how emergency teams want to collaborate with drones, and how to formalize these collaborations into repeatable processes. Based on four field trials and 95 interviews, we derive 44 interaction patterns grouped into 10 meta-patterns reflecting operational needs such as reconnaissance, communication, and logistical support. To structure these practices, we introduce DroneLets - a new class of design artifacts that extend Collaboration Engineering to embodied agents. DroneLets capture setup requirements, drone capabilities, environmental constraints, and coordinated actions across human and drone actors. They offer a modular framework for designing repeatable, scalable collaboration processes in emergency services, illustrated through patterns such as broadcasting to bystanders and post-fire monitoring. This work expands the scope of CE and provides a structured foundation for integrating autonomous drones into high-stakes field operations.