Self-organised Feedback in Human Swarm Interaction

Abstract —Human-swarm interaction (HSI) consists of bidi-rectional interaction between a human operator and swarms ofautonomous robots. In HSI, a human operator directs robots tocarry out tasks. However, in order to direct a swarm of robots,the operator must receive appropriate feedback about what isgoing on in the swarm.In this paper, we argue that self-organised mechanismsshould be responsible for providing feedback in HSI sys-tems, and argue against the current approach that involvesan extra `intepretation layer' layer dependent on additionalinfrastructure and modelling. We present a recent study that weconducted in the eld of HSI, in which a human operator hadto guide groups of robots to designated task completion zones.Based on this study, we propose some initial steps towards ourvision of self-organised feedback. I. I NTRODUCTION Swarm robotics systems consist of large groups of rela-tively simple and cheap robots, interacting and cooperatingwith each other to carry out (hopefully) complex tasks.Swarm robotics is inspired by the observation of social insectbehaviours, like ants, bees and sh, all of which displayrobust, scalable and exible behaviours [1]. Much recentresearch attention has been devoted to swarm robotics —prevalent examples including the multimillion euro Swarm-bots