Towards Bi-Directional Communication in Human-Swarm Teaming: A Survey
This work synthesizes existing research to advance human-swarm teaming for applications like search-and-rescue, but it is incremental as it reviews and organizes prior work rather than introducing new methods.
The paper surveys the multidisciplinary literature on human-swarm teaming to address the challenge of integrating fast robot swarms with slower human decision-making cycles, concluding with a framework for closed-loop adaptive systems.
Swarm systems consist of large numbers of robots that collaborate autonomously. With an appropriate level of human control, swarm systems could be applied in a variety of contexts ranging from search-and-rescue situations to Cyber defence. The two decision making cycles of swarms and humans operate on two different time-scales, where the former is normally orders of magnitude faster than the latter. Closing the loop at the intersection of these two cycles will create fast and adaptive human-swarm teaming networks. This paper brings desperate pieces of the ground work in this research area together to review this multidisciplinary literature. We conclude with a framework to synthesize the findings and summarize the multi-modal indicators needed for closed-loop human-swarm adaptive systems.