Human-Drone Partnerships for Emergency Response

Keywords: drones, software engineering, participatory design, object detection, first responders
Fall 2019 - Present
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Description

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search and rescue, offers the potential for huge societal benefits. However, designing an effective solution in this complex domain represents a "wicked design" problem, requiring a careful balance between trade-offs associated with drone autonomy versus human control, mission functionality versus safety, and the diverse needs of different stakeholders. This paper focuses on designing for situational awareness (SA) using a scenario-driven, participatory design process. We developed SA cards describing six common design-problems, known as SA demons, and three new demons of importance to our domain. We then used these SA cards to equip domain experts with SA knowledge so that they could more fully engage in the design process. We designed a potentially reusable solution for achieving SA in multi-stakeholder, multi-UAV, emergency response applications.

This work was supported by NSF Award No. CNS-1931962.

Publications

  • "NOMAD: A Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset, for Emergency Response
    Scenarios,"
    Arturo Russell Bernal, Jane Cleland-Huang, Walter Scheirer,
    Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision
    (WACV),
    January 2024.
    [pdf]
    [bibtex]
    @inproceedings{russell2024nomad,
    title={NOMAD: A Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset,
    for Emergency Response Scenarios},
    author={Russell Bernal, Arturo Miguel and
    Scheirer, Walter and
    Cleland-Huang, Jane},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference
    on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
    pages={8584--8595},
    year={2024}
    }
  • "Adaptive Autonomy in Human-on-the-Loop Vision-Based Robotics Systems,"
    Sophia Abraham, Zachariah Carmichael, Sreya Banerjee, Rosaura G. VidalMata,
    Ankit Agrawal, Md Nafee Al Islam, Walter J. Scheirer,
    Jane Cleland-Huang,
    Workshop on AI Engineering – Software Engineering for AI (WAIN),
    May 2021.
    [pdf]
    [bibtex]
    @inproceedings{Abraham_WAIN2021,
    author = {Sophia Abraham and
    Zachariah Carmichael and
    Sreya Banerjee and
    Rosaura G. VidalMata and
    Ankit Agrawal and
    Md Nafee Al Islam and Walter J. Scheirer and Jane Cleland-Huang},
    title = {Adaptive Autonomy in Human-on-the-Loop Vision-Based Robotics Systems},
    booktitle = {Workshop on AI Engineering – Software Engineering for AI (WAIN},
    year = {2021}
    }
  • "The Next Generation of Human-Drone Partnerships: Co-Designing an Emergency
    Response System,"
    Ankit Agrawal, Sophia Abraham, Benjamin Burger, Chichi Christine, Luke Fraser,
    John Hoeksema, Sara Hwang, Elizabeth Travnik, Shreya Kumar, Walter J. Scheirer,
    Jane Cleland-Huang, Michael Vierhauser,
    Ryan Bauer, Steve Cox,
    Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    (Honorable Mention Award),
    April 2020.
    [pdf]
    [bibtex]
    @misc{agrawal2020generation,
    title={The Next Generation of Human-Drone Partnerships: Co-Designing an Emergency
    Response System},
    author={Ankit Agrawal and Sophia Abraham and Benjamin Burger and Chichi Christine
    and Luke Fraser and John Hoeksema and Sara Hwang and Elizabeth Travnik and
    Shreya Kumar and Walter Scheirer and Jane Cleland-Huang and Michael Vierhauser
    and Ryan Bauer and Steve Cox},
    year={2020},
    eprint={2001.03849},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.HC}
    }