Come See This! Augmented Reality to Enable Human-Robot Cooperative Search

Robots operating alongside humans in field environments have the potential to greatly increase the situational awareness of their human teammates. A significant challenge, however, is the efficient conveyance of what the robot perceives to the human in order to achieve improved situational awareness. We believe augmented reality (AR), which allows a human to simultaneously perceive the real world and digital information situated virtually in the real world, has the potential to address this issue. Motivated by the emerging prevalence of practical human-wearable AR devices, we present a system that enables a robot to perform cooperative search with a human teammate, where the robot can both share search results and assist the human teammate in navigation to the search target. We demonstrate this ability in a search task in an uninstrumented environment where the robot identifies and localizes targets and provides navigation direction via AR to bring the human to the correct target.