Gesturing at Subswarms: Towards Direct Human Control of Robot Swarms.

The term human-swarm interaction (HSI) refers to the interaction between a human operator and a swarm of robots. In this paper, we investigate HSI in the context of a resource allocation and guidance scenario. We present a framework that enables direct communication between human beings and real robot swarms, without relying on a secondary display. We provide the user with a gesture-based interface that allows him to issue commands to the robots. In addition, we develop algorithms that allow robots receiving the commands to display appropriate feedback to the user. We evaluate our framework both in simulation and with real-world experiments. We conduct a summative usability study based on experiments in which participants must guide multiple subswarms to different task locations.