An Infrastructure for Large-Scale Human-Robot Interaction

While there is much research in human-robot interaction on the personal, or one-to-one level, there is little on the large scale, or many-to-many. We propose an interaction infrastructure for many human operators to utilize a large number of robots. The infrastructure operates in two phases allowing the tasks and services offered by many robots to be exposed to many users, as well as the personal interaction between a user and a robot. We assume that each robot has some degree of autonomy and that the humans assume a supervisory role. The approach is analyzed in detail on a single robot system with many users to establish it's low level operation and then on a large-scale experiment involving several robot systems offering many tasks and services to many users. In the latter experiment, the infrastructure managed the interaction between hundreds of users and several robot and embedded systems.

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