Towards Intent-Aware Human-Robot Teaming: A Platform for Search-and-Rescue Operations

Search-and-rescue (SAR) requires embodied agents to explore unfamiliar environments under multimodal uncertainty, perform multi-stage interactions, and retrieve spatial memory over long horizons. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate these capabilities in isolation, leaving unclear how failures compound when they must be composed in realistic workflows. We introduce RescueBench, a photo-realistic diagnostic benchmark that instantiates SAR as a four-stage pipeline: multimodal exploration, target rescue, memory-guided return, and final handoff. By combining sequential task composition with stage-level evaluation, RescueBench enables analysis of how exploration and memory failures propagate through embodied rescue workflows. It contains five progressive difficulty levels that vary in environmental complexity, clue ambiguity, and spatial hierarchy, along with an automatic episode generation and annotation pipeline for scalable evaluation and training. We evaluate seven baselines, an oracle reference, and human players, showing that no baselines complete the full task at the greatest difficulty. Stage-level diagnosis identifies autonomous exploration as the dominant failure mode and spatial memory as a second, independent bottleneck, suggesting that these limitations are not resolved by current topological visual-language navigation or map-based methods. Code is available in https://github.com/wukui-muc/RescueBench

Multi-agent heterogeneous air-ground robot teams are attractive for open world search, with applications for reconnaissance, urban search and rescue missions (USAR), disaster response and recovery, and hazardous environments. These two platforms have different failure modes: aerial robots cover ground quickly but cannot resolve small or occluded targets from altitude, while ground robots can identify objects-of-interest, such as people or hazardous objects, at close range but cover less area. Existing language-tasked teams either have roles fixed prior, or have a language model assign them from hand-written capability tags, so the team is unable to know when within a mission an asset is no longer useful. We present HEROIC, a decentralized heterogeneous multi-agent open-vocabulary search coordination framework that requires agents to communicate in natural language only. HEROIC's initial agent role assignment is derived from sensor properties and a scale law to determine whether targets can be detected with a high confidence. From the mission's natural language prompt alone, this law assigns aerial flight altitudes and sweep spacing. When this calculated height falls below the altitude for safe flight, aerial agents re-task themselves from searcher to aerial triage, escort, and route guide for ground agents. Both robots maintain an evidential belief over the search area (bearing rays for positive evidence, a log-odds posterior for negative evidence) and gate any arrival on close-range verification. In full-stack experiments, HEROIC reaches the target 84% of the time across all 6 scenes, compares to 35-54% for vision-language frontier baselines, frontier-based search, lawnmower, and random-walk running the same perception, all while being 2-4x sooner to arrive at the target.

Effective human-robot teamwork requires robots to adapt to partners, situations, and task dynamics from the start of an interaction. In the MATRX Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) environment, people can externalize collaboration patterns (CPs) they discover during teamwork through a chat and reflection interface. We study whether a robot can use such prior team experience to become a better teammate in future interactions. To this end, we represent historical CPs as knowledge-graph episodic memories and use graph representation learning with a node-classification objective to identify a representative and effective memory for reuse. We then initialize the robot with this memory before a new collaboration episode begins. Across 20 participants and 160 round-level observations, initializing the robot with a single automatically selected prior CP increases rescue success from 25.7% to 41.3% and reduces average task time by 283 seconds. The strongest gains appear at the beginning of interaction, suggesting that reusable episodic memory can help robots enter collaboration with more effective task knowledge and support smoother early teamwork.