Human swarm interaction for radiation source search and localization

Abstract

This study 1 shows that appropriate human interaction can benefit a swarm of robots to achieve goals more efficiently. A set of desirable features for human swarm interaction is identified based on the principles of swarm robotics. Human swarm interaction architecture is then proposed that has all of the desirable features. A swarm simulation environment is created that allows simulating a swarm behavior in an indoor environment. The swarm behavior and the results of user interaction are studied by considering radiation source search and localization application of the swarm. Particle swarm optimization algorithm is slightly modified to enable the swarm to autonomously explore the indoor environment for radiation source search and localization. The emergence of intelligence is observed that enables the swarm to locate the radiation source completely on its own. Proposed human swarm interaction is then integrated in a simulation environment and user evaluation experiments are conducted. Participants are introduced to the interaction tool and asked to deploy the swarm to complete the missions. The performance comparison of the user guided swarm to that of the autonomous swarm shows that the interaction interface is fairly easy to learn and that user guided swarm is more efficient in achieving the goals. The results clearly indicate that the proposed interaction helped the swarm achieve emergence.

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction with Limited Situational Awareness

“…In [3] a hybrid control approach allowed operators to teleoperate leaders and switch the swarm algorithm after teleoperation. In contrast to our work, the operator had access to global position information for all robots and algorithm switches did not propagate through the local swarm network.…”

Gesturing at Subswarms: Towards Direct Human Control of Robot Swarms

“…With beacon control, the user can exert an indirect influence on the robots by adding virtual beacons in the GUI. Bashyal et al [3] propose a GUI in which the operator takes the control of a single robot (an avatar) in the swarm. Because the avatar is perceived by the other robots as just another robot of the swam, the operator has the same limited influence as any single robot in the swarm.…”

“…Usability studies are largely absent from the existing body of research in HSI (with the exception of [2,3]). We believe that this is a major omission, and that both objective and subjective usability results should be an essential part of any HSI research.…”

“…We use the Kinect system from Microsoft using the OpenNI library. 3 In our gesture-based interface, each command is associated with a specific gesture (see Fig. 3).…”

Connectivity Differences between Human Operators of Swarms and Bandwidth Limitations

“…Thus, any effort by the operator to move the swarm towards a desired goal will be misinterpreted by a robot, thus creating an intent mismatch between the human and the robot. Current human-swarm interaction (HSI) literature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] does not consider the above aspects of HSI and assumes perfect information transfer between the human and the robots. To close this gap, in this paper, we conduct controlled experiments to study the effect on performance of human-swarm intent mismatch and error in swarm state displayed to the operator in supervisory control of swarm robotic systems.…”