Perspectives on Human-Robot Team Performance from an Evaluation of the DARPA Robotics Challenge

The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a competition designed to advance the capabilities of remotely teleoperated semi-autonomous humanoid robots performing in a disaster response scenario with degraded communications. Throughout the DRC, our evaluation team conducted two studies of human-robot interaction (HRI) for the Trials and Finals competitions. From these studies, we have generated recommendations and design guidelines for HRI with remote, semi-autonomous humanoids, but our findings also have implications outside of the competition’s domain. In this article, we discuss our perspectives on effective and ineffective human-robot teams based upon our experiences at the DRC. We consider the impact of various interfacing and control techniques, the effect of versatile robot design on task performance, and the operational context under which these factors work together to function in a human-centric environment. We use these underlying components of HRI to review how the advancements made at the DRC can be applied to present day robot applications and key capabilities for effective human-robot teams in the future.