Abstract
Human interaction with robot swarms (HSI) is a young field with very few user studies that explore operator behavior. All these studies assume perfect communication between the operator and the swarm. A key challenge in the use of swarm robotic systems in human supervised tasks is to understand human swarm interaction in the presence of limited communication bandwidth, which is a constraint arising in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we present results of human-subject experiments designed to study the effect of bandwidth limitations in human swarm interaction. We consider three levels of bandwidth availability in a swarm foraging task. The lowest bandwidth condition performs poorly, but the medium and high bandwidth condition both perform well. In the medium bandwidth condition, we display useful aggregated swarm information (like swarm centroid and spread) to compress the swarm state information. We also observe interesting operator behavior and adaptation of operators’ swarm reaction.
This research has been sponsored in part by AFOSR FA955008-10356 and ONR Grant N0001409-10680.
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Nunnally, S., Walker, P., Lewis, M., Kolling, A., Chakraborty, N., Sycara, K. (2012). Connectivity Differences between Human Operators of Swarms and Bandwidth Limitations. In: Panigrahi, B.K., Das, S., Suganthan, P.N., Nanda, P.K. (eds) Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing. SEMCCO 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7677. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35380-2_83
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35380-2_83
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