Augmented Reality for Human-Swarm Interaction in a Swarm-Robotic Chemistry Simulation
This work addresses the challenge of human-swarm interaction for researchers in swarm robotics by providing a visualization method to reveal hidden swarm dynamics, though it is incremental as it applies existing graph coloring techniques to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of visualizing individual robots and swarm dynamics in augmented reality by using color and blinking intervals to identify swarm members and clusters, demonstrating the approach in a robotic chemistry simulation where robots simulate atoms forming molecules.
We present a method to register individual members of a robotic swarm in an augmented reality display while showing relevant information about swarm dynamics to the user that would be otherwise hidden. Individual swarm members and clusters of the same group are identified by their color, and by blinking at a specific time interval that is distinct from the time interval at which their neighbors blink. We show that this problem is an instance of the graph coloring problem, which can be solved in a distributed manner in O(log(n)) time. We demonstrate our approach using a swarm chemistry simulation in which robots simulate individual atoms that form molecules following the rules of chemistry. Augmented reality is then used to display information about the internal state of individual swarm members as well as their topological relationship, corresponding to molecular bonds.