Mixed-Granularity Human-Swarm Interaction

We present an augmented reality human-swarm interface that combines two modalities of interaction: environment-oriented and robot-oriented. The environment-oriented modality allows the user to modify the environment (either virtual or physical) to indicate a goal to attain for the robot swarm. The robot-oriented modality makes it possible to select individual robots to reassign them to other tasks to increase performance or remedy failures. Previous research has concluded that environment-oriented interaction might prove more difficult to grasp for untrained users. In this paper, we report a user study which indicates that, at least in collective transport, environment-oriented interaction is more effective than purely robot-oriented interaction, and that the two combined achieve remarkable efficacy.