Neglect Benevolence in Human Control of Swarms in the Presence of Latency

Abstract

Autonomous swarm algorithms have been studied extensively in the past several years. However, there is little research on the effect of injecting human influence into a robot swarm-whether it be to update the swarm's current goals or reshape swarm behavior. While there has been growing research in the field of human-swarm interaction (HSI), no previous studies have investigated how humans interact with swarms under communication latency.We investigate the effects of latency both with and without a predictive display in a basic swarm foraging task to see if such a display can help mitigate the effects of delayed feedback of the swarm state. Furthermore, we introduce a new concept called neglect benevolence to represent how a human operator may need to give time for swarm algorithms to stabilize before issuing new commands, and we investigate it with respect to task performance. Our study shows that latency did affect a user's ability to control a swarm to find targets in the foraging task, and that the predictive display helped to remove these effects. We also found evidence for neglect benevolence, and that operators exploited neglect benevolence in different ways, leading to two different, but equally successful strategies in the target-searching task.