Visualisation of Swarm Metrics on a Handheld Device for Human-Swarm Interaction

Abstract

Swarming robots have the potential to perform many different tasks like coverage, exploration, and navigation in industry, healthcare, military and transportation. However, human control of large numbers of robots is difficult. It is not yet clear which metrics may be beneficial for human-swarm interaction or how to display them. This paper presents an Android platform for permitting human-swarm interaction, while also displaying metrics describing the swarm behavior. The visualization includes charts to represent the changes in boids' grouping, alignment, fragmentation, and coverage metrics. Experiments show how the visualization responds to different behaviors of swarm triggered by human interaction.