Scalable Human Interaction with Robotic Swarms

Multi-Operator Gesture Control of Robotic Swarms Using Wearable Devices

The theory and design of effective interfaces for human interaction with multi-robot systems has recently gained significant interest. Robotic swarms are multi-robot systems where local interactions between robots and neighbors within their spatial neighborhood generate emergent collective behaviors. Most prior work has studied interfaces for human interaction with remote swarms, but swarms als...

Robust Human Interaction with Robotic Swarms

Formica ex Machina: Ant Swarm Foraging from Physical to Virtual and Back Again

Ants use individual memory and pheromone communication to achieve effective collective foraging. We implement these strategies as distributed search algorithms in robotic swarms. Swarms of simple robots are robust, scalable and capable of exploring for resources in unmapped environments. We test the ability of individual robots and teams of three robots to collect tags distributed at random and...

Biologically-Inspired Human-Swarm Interaction Metrics

Human-swarm interaction is an emerging field encompassing questions related to biology, robotics, computer science, human-computer interaction, and psychology. Swarms are large groups of individual entities that enact group behaviors; biological examples include fish, birds and insects. Swarms overwhelm humans’ abilities to monitor and interact with each entity. Human-robot and human-computer i...

Using Haptic Feedback in Human Robotic Swarms Interaction

Robotic swarms display emergent behaviors that are robust to failure of individual robots, although they can not necessarily accomplish complex tasks with these behaviors. The research objective is to make use of their robust behaviors to accomplish complex tasks in many types of environments. For now, it is difficult to affect swarm “goals”, and therefore difficult them to direct to perform co...