Human-multi-robot systems interaction

Abstract

Multi-robot systems are becoming increasingly popular, in the last few years. The possibility of having large computation, communication and sensing capabilities in limited-size devices makes it attractive to solve several applications exploiting the capabilities of a team of robots.

While the majority of current multi-robot systems applications can be found in industrial domains (mainly in the logistics field), the increasing popularity of small-size mobile robotic platforms (ground, aerial, underwater, etc.) will probably lead to having multi-robot systems in domestic, daily-life, applications in the near future.

Usually, multi-robot systems are designed to work autonomously: decentralized control strategies can be found for achieving coordinated behaviors, without the need for a centralized control unit.

We are currently working on including the human operator in the control of multi-robot systems. This will allow to exploit humans’ high-level cognitive capabilities, to achieve interesting and complex behaviors in the multi-robot system.

The main idea is to implement a natural interaction system, that provides the user with an effective way of handling a complex system, with a cognitively sustainable load.

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