Using Affect as a Communication Modality to Improve Human-Robot Communication in Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue Scenarios

Abstract--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 investigate the benefits of using emotions as a communication modality for Search And Rescue (SAR) robots. In the first experiment, we investigated the feasibility of conveying information related to SAR situations through robots' emotions, resulting in mappings from SAR situations to emotions. The second study used Affect Control Theory as an alternative method for deriving such mappings. This method is more flexible, e.g. In the third experiment, we created affective expressions for an appearance-constrained outdoor field research robot using LEDs as an expressive channel. Using these affective expressions in a variety of simulated SAR situations, we evaluated the effect of these expressions on participants' (adopting the role of rescue workers) situational awareness. Our results and proposed methodologies provide (a) insights on how emotions could help conveying messages in the context of SAR, and (b) evidence on the effectiveness of adding emotions as a communication modality in a (simulated) SAR communication context. These situations may happen due to natural or robots to target SAR areas might be more time-efficient man-made [2] causes and require an immediate response, than deploying human rescue workers (thus increasing the as time is a key element for the success of SAR operations operation's speed of progress); and (c) the limited number of [3]. Therefore, improving communication efficiency in human rescue workers since training human rescue workers SAR teams can be beneficial for the success of time-critical requires a lot of time and effort [17]. Although rescue robots have been used in SAR operations The member composition of SAR teams has been changing since early 2000s [14], they still need external help over time. First, rescue dogs were included to help to operate appropriately. To the best of our knowledge, SAR teams by taking advantage of dogs' strong sense of to date, there are no fully autonomous rescue robots or smell, which can help find victims faster [4]. More recently, robot teams that can operate in unstructured and cluttered rescue robots have become a part of SAR teams.