World embedded interfaces for human-robot interaction

Human interaction with large numbers of robots or distributed sensors presents a number of difficult challenges including supervisory management, monitoring of individual and collective state, and apprehending situation awareness. A rich source of information about the environment can be provided even with robots that have no explicit representations or maps of their locale. To do this, we transform a robot swarm into a distributed interface embedded within the environment. Visually, each robot acts like a pixel within a much larger visual display space so that any robot need only communicate a small amount of information from its current location. Our approach uses augmented reality techniques for communicating information to humans from large numbers of small-scale robots to enable situation awareness, monitoring, and control for surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, and path finding.

1. Introduction

Emerging miniaturization technologies (e.g. micro machining and MEMS) will someday enable the creation of large numbers of extremely small robots, with fully self-contained sensors, actuators, computation, and power. While such robots individually are of limited use, thousands of them, operating as a coordinated swarm, could conceivably accomplish a wide range of significant tasks [5], [6], [9]. Ultimately, swarms of small scale robots should be able to achieve large-scale results in tasks such as surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, path finding, payload conveyance, and small-scale actuation. However, to fully exploit the prospects of miniaturization, we must first address the challenges posed by the need for humans to interact with, communicate with, and coordinate the activities of thousands of tiny cooperating entities.