Lessons from the Field: A Case Study of Robotic Intervention in an Industrial Emergency

The tight coupling of subsystems in most robots, though a natural consequence of their complexity, leads to monolithic designs that are time-consuming and difficult to adapt after initial deployment. To address this challenge, we present a framework and supporting abstractions for recomposition during runtime that enable robots to quickly integrate previously unseen modular software, hardware, and compute payloads. Our approach allows non-expert users to quickly add new capabilities in the field through a true plug-and-play process. Crucially, new resources are not only immediately available to a host robot but are also shared with distributed peers, enabling compute-constrained systems to access powerful new remote capabilities. Our framework reduces reconfiguration time to a matter of minutes with no developer intervention, in stark contrast to the hours of expert effort often required for traditional manual integration. We demonstrate our method in two disaster response scenarios, including radioactive source localization at an operational nuclear reactor facility and a thermal-guided search for people in dark, difficult-to-reach spaces. These demonstrations show how in-field recomposition provides timely, flexible, and accessible adaptation to dynamic requirements, representing a critical step toward creating robots that can quickly evolve alongside the tasks, technologies, and environments they support.

In high-risk environments such as disaster response, situational awareness depends not only on detecting hazards but also on communicating them clearly to human operators. Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for scene understanding in safety-critical settings, yet their value as part of human-facing robotic systems remains underexplored. We present a VR-based Human Robot Interaction framework for studying how VLM-assisted robots can support situational awareness in simulated hazardous environments. In our system, a robot explores a virtual scene and queries a VLM to identify potential hazards and annotate user-facing points of interest. These annotations are presented to a human operator through an immersive VR interface. This framework enables controlled evaluation of both robotic hazard identification and the communication of safety-critical information to users. Results from our study indicate that the annotated VR interface was preferred over the unannotated baseline and that participants reported high clarity, usefulness, and comfort when interacting with the system. These findings suggest that combining VLM-based robotic perception with immersive visualization is a promising approach for supporting situational awareness in hazardous settings.

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.