ROBOTRAK: a centralized real-time monitoring, control, and coordination system for robot swarms
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Robot communication and coordination
Distributed Control of Robotic Networks: A Mathematical Approach to Motion Coordination Algorithms
Distributed Control of Robotic Networks: A Mathematical Approach to Motion Coordination Algorithms
An optimal timing approach to controlling multiple UAVs
ACC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 conference on American Control Conference
Neglect benevolence in human-swarm interaction with communication latency
SEMCCO'12 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing
Connectivity differences between human operators of swarms and bandwidth limitations
SEMCCO'12 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing
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In this paper we investigate principles of swarm control that enable a human operator to exert influence on and control large swarms of robots. We present two principles, coined selection and beacon control, that differ with respect to their temporal and spatial persistence. The former requires active selection of groups of robots while the latter exerts a passive influence on nearby robots. Both principles are implemented in a testbed in which operators exert influence on a robot swarm by switching between a set of behaviors ranging from trivial behaviors up to distributed autonomous algorithms. Performance is tested in a series of complex foraging tasks in environments with different obstacles ranging from open to cluttered and structured. The robotic swarm has only local communication and sensing capabilities with the number of robots ranging from 50 to 200. Experiments with human operators utilizing either selection or beacon control are compared with each other and to a simple autonomous swarm with regard to performance, adaptation to complex environments, and scalability to larger swarms. Our results show superior performance of autonomous swarms in open environments, of selection control in complex environments, and indicate a potential for scaling beacon control to larger swarms.