Planning: DCL EPSCOR: CISE Large: Sensing, Planning, and Acting in a Multi-Human, Multi-Aerial Vehicle Job Site

Consider a world in which any user could safely and reliably employ uncrewed aerial systems (or drones) in their work to help with data collection, interaction with the natural or built environment, and even social interactions at work sites rather than as specialty tools with specialist users. While these systems have become pervasive individually, they lack the fundamental understanding of how to work in teams with each other and humans to accomplish larger goals on job sites.

This planning project explores ideas to address the intertwined challenges of communicating amongst users and vehicles in a clear, resilient way to allow safe, reliable interactions in diverse use cases, to distill foundational requirements and constructs for multi-user, multi-drone interactions. This future technology would require work across many disciplines to understand what interfaces are necessary, recognize features of safe interactions between users and across environments, learn how people adopt this technology and how it should adapt to users, codify all of these interactions in robust ways, and develop tests for both the safety and integration of different components.

The goal of this planning project is to develop the initial conceptualization, planning and collaboration activities that aim to formulate new and sound plans for large-scale projects in these emerging research areas. It brings together teams of researchers in supporting science, technology and applications to develop the concepts and plans to transform the design of human-drone interactions, enabling safer ubiquity on job sites and overcoming the current limitations of siloed deployment and software.

It looks holistically at the human-drone team, understanding components of interaction that are generalizable across contexts, and developing systems which can be used anywhere to enable safer, more efficient teaming. This research planning project focuses on radically improving communications, developing methodologies for close interactions in independent multi-human-robot teams, and tools to support interactions with diverse users in applications such as construction and search-and-rescue.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.