Using Coverage for Measuring the Effect of Haptic Feedback in Human Robotic Swarm Interaction

Abstract

A robotic swarm is a decentralized group of robots which overcome failure of individual robots with robust emergent behaviors based on local interactions. These behaviors are not well built for accomplishing complex tasks, however, because of the changing assumptions required in various appli- cations and environments. A new movement in the research field is to add human input to influence the swarm in order to help make the robots goal directed and overcome these problems. This research in Human Swarm Interaction (HSI) focuses on different control laws and ways to integrate the human intent with local control laws of the robots. Previous studies have all used visual feedback through a computer interface to give the user the swarm state information. This study shows the benefits of giving the operator haptic feedback as well along with the visual feedback in a target searching class. Researchers in multi-robot systems have shown benefits of haptic feedback in obstacle navigation before, but this study is a novel method because of the decentralized formation of the robotic swarm. In most environments, operators were able to cover significantly more area, increasing the chance of finding more targets. The other environment found no significant difference, showing that the haptic feedback does not degrade performance in any of the tested environments. This supports our hypothesis that haptic feedback is useful in HSI and requires further research to maximize its potential.