Robot swarms as embodied extensions of humans

Abstract

In order to harness the potential of robot swarms, humans must be able to control decentralized and self-organizing multi-agent systems. The field of human-swarm interaction investigates how humans with their centralized information and control demands can be paired with the decentralized architectures of robot swarms. Recently, we have proposed an architecture which aims at balancing the trade-offs between centralized and decentralized control and communication in human-swarm interaction while joining the relative capabilities of human cognition and swarm intelligence. In this article, we expand on this architecture by discussing a list of design requirements that must be met in order to make robot swarms embodied extensions of humans that act and feel like natural body parts. We also conceptually show how some of the design requirements could be implemented by simple rules when we take the world’s structure into account.