Human-Swarm Interface for Abstraction Based Control

Decentralized control of a large number of agents acting as a single swarm is an active ¯eld of research. More recently the problem of how to instruct the swarm to perform certain tasks, and in particular, how to interface the swarm to a human operator has arisen. This paper describes a Human Swarm Interface under development at University of Pisa which aims at providing the human operator with an easy to use display console and an input device which allows him/her to intuitively control and monitor a swarm position and shape over time. The swarm position and shape is de¯ned using an abstraction based approach; each single swarm agent estimates the swarm state via a distributed consensus algorithm and moves according to a steepest descent algorithm toward minimization of the error between human operator command and swarm state. The paper presents some new developments of the DEAS testbed as well, where the proposed interface is implemented and tested, which face the issues of inter agent synchronization and con°ict-free wireless communications. Simulation and experimental results are shown.