Working in a Heartbeat: Considerations for AI Teammates in Search and Rescue Teams

As artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have become more capable as technologies, human-AI teams (HATs) have sought to model how humans can interdependently work with AI to accomplish a shared goal. Specifically, HATs seek to leverage autonomy in both digital and physical AI agents to improve the teamwork and outcomes of these teams. In search-and-rescue (SAR) teams, where situations are dynamic and the environments are hazardous, HATs require complex considerations for interdependent work with AI. This qualitative interview study explores insights from 17 SAR professionals to investigate teamwork considerations that can benefit the formation of search-and-rescue human-AI teams (SAR-HATs). Participants’ concerns about time and affective needs suggest that SAR-HATs would benefit significantly from the explicit delineation of search and rescue tasks. HATs can expedite search tasks without forgoing safety by delegating roles that afford parallel completion of information acquisitions, search routines, and safety precautions. Additionally, search tasks can afflict human teammates with psychological trauma, but AI teammates benefit from their insusceptibility to trauma-related stressors. However, in rescue tasks, these capabilities have inverse benefits, wherein humans benefit from their capacity to feel emotion when interacting with the patients, and AI may struggle.