Mixed-Granularity Human-Swarm Interaction
This work addresses the challenge of improving interaction efficiency for users, particularly in swarm robotics applications, though it appears incremental by building on prior research on interaction modalities.
The paper tackles the problem of human-swarm interaction by introducing an augmented reality interface that combines environment-oriented and robot-oriented modalities, finding that the combined approach achieves remarkable efficacy in collective transport tasks.
We present an augmented reality human-swarm interface that combines two modalities of interaction: environment-oriented and robot-oriented. The environment-oriented modality allows the user to modify the environment (either virtual or physical) to indicate a goal to attain for the robot swarm. The robot-oriented modality makes it possible to select individual robots to reassign them to other tasks to increase performance or remedy failures. Previous research has concluded that environment-oriented interaction might prove more difficult to grasp for untrained users. In this paper, we report a user study which indicates that, at least in collective transport, environment-oriented interaction is more effective than purely robot-oriented interaction, and that the two combined achieve remarkable efficacy.