Vaidyanath

In search and rescue missions, robots can potentially help save survivors faster than human emergency responders alone would. In our experimental virtual reality simulation environment we have a system which comprises a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a virtual "spokesperson". The UAVs and the spokesperson are equipped with natural language capabilities through which they can communicate with the survivors to convince them to evacuate. If they fail to do so they can ask the human operator to intervene. We use reinforcement learning to automatically learn a policy to be followed when a UAV has located survivors.