Abstract
The term human-swarm interaction (HSI) refers to the interaction between a human operator and a swarm of robots. In this paper, we investigate HSI in the context of a resource allocation and guidance scenario. We present a framework that enables direct communication between human beings and real robot swarms, without relying on a secondary display. We provide the user with a gesture-based interface that allows him to issue commands to the robots. In addition, we develop algorithms that allow robots receiving the commands to display appropriate feedback to the user. We evaluate our framework both in simulation and with real-world experiments. We conduct a summative usability study based on experiments in which participants must guide multiple subswarms to different task locations.
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Notes
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As it goes beyond the scope of this paper, we do not discuss the gesture recognition algorithm.
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Ideally, the GUI should also have had steering functionality. However, GUI design was not the purpose of this research, and for time constraints we kept the GUI as simple as possible and restricted to button-based functionality.
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We did not succeed in establishing statistically significant difference between the gesture-based interface and the GUI (\(p_{ToT}=0.07\), \(p_{SUS}=0.55\)). However, as the goal of this paper was not to design a GUI, such precise comparison would be fairly meaningless.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the European Research Council through the ERC Advanced Grant “E-SWARM: Engineering Swarm Intelligence Systems” (contract 246939). Rehan O’Grady and Marco Dorigo acknowledge support from the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS.
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Podevijn, G., O’Grady, R., Nashed, Y.S.G., Dorigo, M. (2014). Gesturing at Subswarms: Towards Direct Human Control of Robot Swarms. In: Natraj, A., Cameron, S., Melhuish, C., Witkowski, M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8069. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43645-5_41
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