Self-organised Feedback in Human Swarm Interaction

Human-swarm interaction (HSI) consists of bidirectional interaction between a human operator and swarms of autonomous robots. In HSI, a human operator directs robots to carry out tasks. However, in order to direct a swarm of robots, the operator must receive appropriate feedback about what is going on in the swarm. In this paper, we argue that self-organised mechanisms should be responsible for providing feedback in HSI systems, and argue against the current approach that involves an extra ‘intepretation layer’ layer dependent on additional infrastructure and modelling. We present a recent study that we conducted in the field of HSI, in which a human operator had to guide groups of robots to designated task completion zones. Based on this study, we propose some initial steps towards our vision of self-organised feedback.