Interface for Monitoring and Interacting with Multi-Terrain Robot Teams

Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Previous research on human-robot interfaces has been mainly concerned with interaction between one person and one robot or software agent. Yet, there are many scenarios in which multiple human-multiple robot interactions are possible, such as with teams of rescue robots, combat robot teams, or surveillance robots. Our work seeks to turn a fastpaced interactive multi-agent system (Gamebots) into an interface where multiple researchers monitor and interact with teams of multi-terrain robots. Gamebots (figure 1) consists of a commercially developed 3D graphics engine Unreal Tournament (UT), which has been extended and enhanced to provide the important capabilities required for multi-agent research. It supports humans-as-agents, thus allowing multi-agent researchers to investigate scenarios involving human-agent competitions and collaboration.