Connectivity Differences Between Human Operators of Swarms and Bandwidth Limitations?

Abstract. Human interaction with robot swarms (HSI) is a young field with very few user studies that explore operator behavior. All these stud-ies assume perfect communication between the operator and the swarm. A key challenge in the use of swarm robotic systems in human super-vised tasks is to understand human swarm interaction in the presence of limited communication bandwidth, which is a constraint arising in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we present results of human-subject ex-periments designed to study the effect of bandwidth limitations in human swarm interaction. We consider three levels of bandwidth availability in a swarm foraging task. The lowest bandwidth condition performs poorly, but the medium and high bandwidth condition both perform well. In the medium bandwidth condition, we display useful aggregated swarm infor-mation (like swarm centroid and spread) to compress the swarm state information. We also observe interesting operator behavior and adapta-tion of operators ’ swarm reaction.