Our paper is entitled Human-Drone Partnerships in Emergency Response: Co-designing an emergency response system
Two of our students built a carry and drop mechanism to show how UAVs could be used to deliver defibrillators
Drones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in emergency response missions
For example, they can be used by fire-fighters to survey burning buildings and to map hot spots on roofs.
In the Spring of 2018 we performed a demo with the local firefighter to showcase how drones could be used for river rescue.
The fire at Notre Dame cathedral is an example of drones being used for aerial survey during a disaster response.
However, we envision much more. We envision semi-autonomous drones as fully fledged members of the mission team.
We are building our DroneResponse system using our existing Dronology system, which supports the coordinated flight of multiple drones.
In this river rescue example, drones plan their own routes, adapt dynamically to changing conditions, and interact with humans to seek guidance and to provide birds-eye information.
Drone missions are highly dependent upon accurate onboard vision capabilities
Drone response is a complex socio-technical cyber-physical system and represents a wicked design problem.
We engaged closely with the South Bend fire department in the co-design of DroneResponse
We created visionary mockups to stimulate brainstorming sessions
We used paper cutouts to explore the firefighters' preferences based on their current system for supporting manual drone operations.
The work in this paper focused on designing for situational awareness. This is the ability for users to fully perceive, understand, and make decisions in a given situation.
Situational awareness demons document common user interface design problems associated with situational awareness problems. Examples include attentional tunneling, incorrect conceptual models, and information overload. We introduce three new demons of enigmatic autonomy, misaligned interfaces, and communciation failures.
Misaligned interfaces caused our UAV to plummet to the ground when a human took manual control.
We developed an executable prototype, capable of executing the scenarios.
We used these in a series of participatory design sessions with firefighters.
In an early prototype we displayed imagery in the panel on the right hand side. However, firefighters wanted to see images of potential victims in full-screen model
We worked with the firefighters to redesign the victim confirmation screen to make the image much larger.
The firefighters raised numerous interesting questions about autonomy, as this was the aspect of DroneResponse that really differed from their current experience with drones.
The firefighters pushed the boundaries of the system. They envisioned a system that went beyond our ‘imagined’ boundaries and included mobile applications for use by rescuers on boats.
We are integrating all of the design decisions into the current version of our system. The co-design process also revealed interactions between humans and drones that needed to be supported at the architectural level.
The drone response project includes many design challenges due to its complexity, the interactions of humans and drones, the safety aspects of UAV flight, and the ethical issues associated with the use of UAVs in emergency response.
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