Omnipotent Virtual Giant for Remote Human–Swarm Interaction

Jang, Inmo; Hu, Junyan; Arvin, Farshad; Carrasco, Joaquin; Lennox, Barry

Abstract

This paper proposes an intuitive human-swarm interaction framework inspired by our childhood memory in which we interacted with living ants by changing their positions and environments as if we were omnipotent relative to the ants. In virtual reality, analogously, we can be a super-powered virtual giant who can supervise a swarm of robots in a vast and remote environment by flying over or resizing the world, and coordinate them by picking and placing a robot or creating virtual walls. This work implements this idea by using Virtual Reality along with Leap Motion, which is then validated by proof-of-concept experiments using real and virtual mobile robots in mixed reality. We conduct a usability analysis to quantify the effectiveness of the overall system as well as the individual interfaces proposed in this work. The results reveal that the proposed method is intuitive and feasible for interaction with swarm robots, but may require appropriate training for the new end-user interface device.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: 2021 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
• Start Date: Aug 8, 2021
• End Date: Aug 12, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Aug 23, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: May 27, 2022
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 488-494
• Series ISSN: 1944-9437
• ISBN: 978-1-6654-4637-2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ro-man50785.2021.9515542
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1136747