Abstract
A key challenge in human–swarm interaction is to design a usable interface that allows the human operators to monitor and control a scalable swarm. In our study, we restrict the interactions to only one-to-one communications in local neighborhoods between UAV-UAV and operator-UAV. This type of proximal interactions will decrease the cognitive complexity of the human–swarm interaction to O(1). In this paper, a user study with 100 participants provides evidence that visualizing a swarm as a heat map is more effective in addressing usability and acceptance in human–swarm interaction. We designed an interactive interface based on the users’ preference and proposed a controlling mechanism that allows a human operator to control a large swarm of UAVs. We evaluated the proposed interaction interface with a complementary user study. Our testbed and results establish a benchmark to study human–swarm interaction where a scalable swarm can be managed by a single operator.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are commonly used to rapidly gather situational awareness in emergency responses or security applications
In a user study with 100 participants, we evaluated the effect of different visualization techniques on the usability of human–swarm interaction interface and reported the result; The preferred visualization method is used to build an interaction interface
This user-study provides evidence that heat map methods are more effective in addressing usability and acceptance in human–swarm interaction
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are commonly used to rapidly gather situational awareness in emergency responses or security applications. A number of works have focused on using a swarm of autonomous UAVs [1,2,3], where the UAVs have high degrees of autonomy and can coordinate with each other using simple rules and low-power communication. These limitations on computation and communication (e.g., to avoid using up their battery or to avoid detection by threats) introduce huge challenges when it comes to monitoring and managing the collective actions of the swarm [4]. As the size of the swarm grows, so does the complexity that human operators face in terms of directing individual UAVs, orienting to the, possibly delayed, information relayed by the swarm, and monitoring the health of the swarm (e.g., UAVs may be taken down by threats such as fires or enemy attack)
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