Effectiveness of Augmented Reality for Human Swarm Interactions

Human-Swarm Interaction (HSI) is a fast-growing research area in swarm robotics. One challenging aspect of HSI is facilitating effective handling of the many degrees-of-freedom present in robot swarms by humans. One emergent option is the use of Augmented Reality (AR) systems to encode information. AR based interfaces can help provide human operators with visual cues about the swarm's states and control to facilitate decision-making. In research settings, AR systems can address issues such as limited availability of lab spaces, limited access to robotics resources, and the need for the ability to simulate dynamic environments with which robots and humans can interact. Further, to make swarm robotics more accessible and ubiquitous, HSI systems that support remote interaction would allow humans to interact with robot swarms and multi-robot systems regardless of the geographical distance between humans and swarms. Taking these into consideration, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of AR based interfaces as tools for remote interaction in HSI systems. We developed a simple AR based interface and evaluated its effectiveness against an unaugmented interface, by means of remote human user studies where a human operator would control a team of robots remotely through a video call. Our finding suggests that augmentation can improve control accuracy and reduce collision safety violations when performing navigation tasks. Through experimental surveys, it is shown that operators with varying levels of robotics and technology experience overwhelmingly prefer the augmented interface to facilitate swarm control. These results suggest that AR-based interfaces are effective in improving the control experience in remote HSI.