Abstract

The interaction between a user and a multi-robot system in a shared environment is a relatively uncharted topic. But, as these types of systems will increase in the future years, an efficient way of communication is necessary. To this aim, it is interesting to discover if a multi-robot system can communicate its intentions exploiting only some motion-variables, which are characteristics of the motion of the robots. This study is about the legibility of a multi-robot system: in particular, we focus on the influence of these motion-variables on the legibility of more than one group of robots that move in a shared environment with the user. These motion-variables are: trajectory, dispersion and stiffness. They are generally used to define the motion of a group of mobile robots. Trajectory and dispersion were found relevant for the correctness of the communication between the user and the multi-robot system, while stiffness was found relevant for the rapidity of communication. The analysis of the influence of the motion-variables was carried out with an ANOVA (analysis of variance) based on a series of data coming from an experimental campaign conducted in a virtual reality set-up.

Highlights

  • Human-multi-robot interaction is a new frontier in the robotics field and it is increasingly becoming important because of the growth of popularity of multi-robot systems that share the same environment with human users

  • The survey about human-swarm-interaction [1] points out the low development of methods of communication in the case of proximal interaction, which implies a shared environment between the user and the multi-robot system

  • We focus on proximal interaction and in the direct communication between users and robots

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Summary

Introduction

Human-multi-robot interaction is a new frontier in the robotics field and it is increasingly becoming important because of the growth of popularity of multi-robot systems that share the same environment with human users. The survey about human-swarm-interaction [1] points out the low development of methods of communication in the case of proximal interaction, which implies a shared environment between the user and the multi-robot system. We focus on proximal interaction and in the direct communication between users and robots. There exist studies that cover both directions of communication: from the user to the robot and vice-versa. The user should be able to control the robotic system and, taking a cue from the communication between humans, a simple way is to implement speech, or face and gesture recognition [5], [6]

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