Related papers: Effects of Swarm Size Variability on Operator Work…
Robot swarms often exhibit emergent behaviors that are fascinating to observe; however, it is often difficult to predict what swarm behaviors can emerge under a given set of agent capabilities. We seek to efficiently leverage human input to…
Production scheduling is an essential task in manufacturing, with Reinforcement Learning (RL) emerging as a key solution. In a previous work, RL was utilized to solve an extended permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) for a…
Robot swarms offer the potential to bring several advantages to the real-world applications but deploying them presents challenges in ensuring feasibility across diverse environments. Assessing the feasibility of new tasks for swarms is…
Multi-human multi-robot (MH-MR) systems have the ability to combine the potential advantages of robotic systems with those of having humans in the loop. Robotic systems contribute precision performance and long operation on repetitive tasks…
Productive and efficient human-robot teaming is a highly desirable ability in service robots, yet there is a fundamental trade-off that a robot needs to consider in such tasks. On the one hand, gaining information from communication with…
This paper investigates learning effects and human operator training practices in variable autonomy robotic systems. These factors are known to affect performance of a human-robot system and are frequently overlooked. We present the results…
While a number of excellent review articles on military robots have appeared in existing literature, this paper focuses on a distinct sub-space of related problems: small military robots organized into moderately sized squads, operating in…
In operations of multi-agent teams ranging from homogeneous robot swarms to heterogeneous human-autonomy teams, unexpected events might occur. While efficiency of operation for multi-agent task allocation problems is the primary objective,…
The deployment of autonomous drone swarms in disaster response missions necessitates the development of flexible, scalable, and robust coordination systems. Traditional fixed architectures struggle to cope with dynamic and unpredictable…
We analyse numerically the effects of small population size in the initial transient regime of a simple example population dynamics. These effects play an important role for the numerical determination of large deviation functions of…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…
Supervisory-based human-robot teams are deployed in various dynamic and extreme environments (e.g., space exploration). Achieving high task performance in such environments is critical, as a mistake may lead to significant monetary loss or…
Micro- and nanorobotics have the potential to revolutionize many applications including targeted material delivery, assembly, and surgery. The same properties that promise breakthrough solutions---small size and large populations---present…
We present an experimental and theoretical study of 2-D swarms in which collective behavior emerges from both direct local mechanical coupling between agents and from the exchange and processing of information between agents. Each agent, an…
In this paper, we present a systematic method of design for human-swarm interaction interfaces, combining theoretical insights with empirical evaluation. We first derived ten design principles from existing literature, applying them to key…
Formal Modelling is often used as part of the design and testing process of software development to ensure that components operate within suitable bounds even in unexpected circumstances. In this paper, we use predictive formal modelling…
Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the…
The emergence of collective decision in swarms and their coordinated response to complex environments underscore the central role played by social transmission of information. Here, the different possible origins of information flow…
We present a method for the control of robot swarms using two subsets of robots: a larger group of simple, oblivious robots (which we call the workers) that is governed by simple local attraction forces, and a smaller group (the guides)…
The biologically-inspired swarm paradigm is being used to design self-organizing systems of locally interacting artificial agents. A major difficulty in designing swarms with desired characteristics is understanding the causal relation…