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 interaction metrics are inappropriate to describe human-swarm interactions alone due to the interaction challenges posed by swarms. It is unknown precisely how humans respond to interacting with swarms. The theory is that biological swarm metrics may be appropriate for analyzing human-swarm interaction. Nine human-swarm interaction metric categories derived from the biological and robotic swarm literature are presented, including example metrics from each category. This paper opens the discussion regarding what types of existing swarm metrics may be applicable and what categories of metrics will be important for human-swarm interaction assessment.