Biologically-Inspired Human-Swarm Interaction Metrics

Abstract

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.

Human Interaction With Robot Swarms: A Survey

“…Reliable metrics regarding the performance of a swarm in real applications are not available, apart from some early results in [141] and [142], and their general need is identified in several swarm surveys [5]- [7]. From the perspective of HSI, this is a promising area of research, and when monitoring swarms, operators can greatly benefit from such metrics, e.g., when managing competing tasks while monitoring the quality of service in the communication network.…”

Heuristic Evaluation of Swarm Metrics' Effectiveness

“…Seven swarm metrics were chosen: cohesion, diffusion, center of gravity, directional accuracy, flock thickness, resource depletion, and swarm health [5]. Each metric is applied to the visualization based on a seven point scale, where a 1 indicates that the visualization performs the worst for the given metric and 7 means that it is the best for a given metric.…”

“…Cohesion measures how well the visualization shows the swarm's degree of connectivity [3,5]. Diffusion evaluates the ability of the visualization to indicate an individual swarm member's movement, including convergence and dispersal of swarm members [1,5].…”

“…Diffusion evaluates the ability of the visualization to indicate an individual swarm member's movement, including convergence and dispersal of swarm members [1,5]. The center of gravity represents how well the visualization shows the swarm's center of gravity, which is defined as the point in the swarm's spatial distribution that minimizes the squared distances to all other points of the swarm [5,6]. The swarm's directional accuracy measures the swarm's motion and direction along a desired travel vector and how well it is represented by the visualization [2,5].…”

“…Four possible swarm visualizations are proposed. A heuristic evaluation applied swarm metrics [5] to the visualizations and the standard individual entity visualization. Swarm tasks were analyzed similarly.…”