A Telepresence-Robot Approach for Efficient Coordination of Swarms

In this paper we explore a novel perspective on surveillance robotics, which is based on a coordination principle of honeybees, and on the integration of an autonomous telepresence robot in such system. Coordination principles, based on biological systems such as ant, bee and termite colonies, show several properties which are essential to multi-robot surveillance, including low computation load, robustness, scalability and adaptability. In this paper we aim to improve on the efficiency of such a robotic swarm by taking a human in the loop by means of a telepresence robot. The human operator controlling the telepresence robot will aim to speed up the convergence of the swarm. The experiments, which evaluate the proposed multi-robot coordination system both in simulation and on real robots, show how the telepresence robot substantially increases the efficiency of the process.