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Deployment of robots into hazardous environments typically involves a ``Human-Robot Teaming'' (HRT) paradigm, in which a human supervisor interacts with a remotely operating robot inside the hazardous zone. Situational Awareness (SA) is…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of high-level semantics (evaluation of the environment) on Human-Robot Teams (HRT) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in the context of mobile robot deployments. Although semantics has been widely…
This paper proposes a taxonomy of semantic information in robot-assisted disaster response. Robots are increasingly being used in hazardous environment industries and emergency response teams to perform various tasks. Operational…
Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine the data for…
The capability of a mobile robot to efficiently and safely perform complex missions is limited by its knowledge of the environment, namely the situation. Advanced reasoning, decision-making, and execution skills enable an intelligent agent…
Current technological advances open up new opportunities for bringing human-machine interaction to a new level of human-centered cooperation. In this context, a key issue is the semantic understanding of the environment in order to enable…
For robots to navigate and interact more richly with the world around them, they will likely require a deeper understanding of the world in which they operate. In robotics and related research fields, the study of understanding is often…
Situation awareness (SA)--comprising the ability to 1) perceive critical elements in the environment, 2) comprehend their meanings, and 3) project their future states--is critical for human operator performance. Due to the disruptive nature…
Emotions can provide a natural communication modality to complement the existing multi-modal capabilities of social robots, such as text and speech, in many domains. We conducted three online studies with 112, 223, and 151 participants to…
Situation awareness (SA) is an important constituent in human information processing and essential in pilots' decision-making processes. Acquiring and maintaining appropriate levels of SA is critical in aviation environments as it affects…
Maintaining situational awareness (SA) is critical in human-robot teams. Yet, under high workload and dynamic conditions, operators often experience SA gaps. Automated detection of SA gaps could provide timely assistance for operators.…
As part of a perennial project, our team is actively engaged in developing new synthetic assistant (SA) technologies to assist in training combat medics and medical first responders. It is critical that medical first responders are well…
Wirelessly-connected robotic systems empower robots with real-time intelligence by leveraging remote computing resources for decision-making. However, the data exchange between robots and edge servers often overwhelms communication links,…
When interacting in unstructured human environments, occasional robot failures are inevitable. When such failures occur, everyday people, rather than trained technicians, will be the first to respond. Existing natural language explanations…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in emergency first response (EFR) applications to support situational awareness (SA) and decision-making, yet most operate on text or 2D imagery and offer little support for core EFR SA…
In human-robot teams, human situational awareness is the operator's conscious knowledge of the team's states, actions, plans and their environment. Appropriate human situational awareness is critical to successful human-robot collaboration.…
Disasters frequently exceed established hazard models, revealing blind spots where unforeseen impacts and vulnerabilities hamper effective response. This perspective paper contends that situational awareness (SA)-the ability to perceive,…
Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications…
Ensuring safe interactions in human-centric environments requires robots to understand and adhere to constraints recognized by humans as "common sense" (e.g., "moving a cup of water above a laptop is unsafe as the water may spill" or…
The word semantics, in robotics and AI, has no canonical definition. It usually serves to denote additional data provided to autonomous agents to aid HRI. Most researchers seem, implicitly, to understand that such data cannot simply be…