Wearable multi-modal interface for human multi-robot interaction

Mixed-Granularity Human-Swarm Interaction

“…Robot-oriented interactions occur when a user must engage with individual robots, e.g., to make them into leaders other robots must follow [6], to hand-pick robots for a specific task [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], or to use a robot as tangible interface for gaming and education [12], [13]. The main advantage of these interfaces is the simplicity of their abstraction (the user becomes part of the swarm); however, with collective behaviors in which the user must interact with multiple robots, the downside of this approach is the large amount of information a user must provide to the robots (e.g., in the form of number of user commands per task).…”

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

“…When the operator is deployed alongside the robot and shares its environment, one may use instead proximity interaction modalities, that assume that a direct line‐of‐sight to the robot is available; then different interfaces can be used, ranging from standard joysticks (e.g., for low‐level control of UAVs) to hands‐free gesture‐based interfaces based on sensorized armbands (Wolf, Assad, Vernacchia, Fromm, & Jethani, ), armbands (Cacace et al, ; Gromov, Gambardella, & Giusti, ), smart watches (Villani et al, ) or voice commands (Gromov, Gambardella, & Di Caro, ).…”

“…This is accomplished through the development of novel human–robot interfaces, and control and perception algorithms that allow human operators to dynamically switch between full autonomy and shared control as the rescue situation demands. Throughout the project, the member labs have made fundamental contributions in perception (Fankhauser et al, ; Gawel et al, ; Scaramuzza et al, ), control (Bellicoso, Jenelten, Gehring, & Hutter, 2018b; Faessler et al, ), and human–robot interaction (Gromov et al, ; Rognon et al, ), for flying (Falanga et al, ; Mintchev & Floreano, ), legged (Hutter et al, ), and amphibious robots (Horvat et al, 2017a). A recent research focus has been on field readiness and deployments in real‐world environments, and to that end, teams of flying, walking, and amphibious robots from NCCR have performed demonstrations in increasingly challenging and realistic environments, moving from indoor mock‐up scenarios (NCCR‐Demo, ), to the European Robotics League Emergency Robots Competition (ERL, ), and a week‐long event in a military rescue training facility.…”

Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted IMU

“…One important issue to be solved is the perception of the operator's gestures. Perception can be the responsibility of a robot (or of a group of cooperatively-sensing robots [20,16]); of the environment [21]; or, as in our case, of a device worn by the user [11,12,22]. The first approach is the most popular in human-robot interaction (HRI) research.…”