Tangible Robotic Fleet Control

The use of multi-robot teams for field missions is increasing in number and scope, requiring command and control interfaces to be adapted to the operator's needs. Instead of working on interaction modalities that emerge from the engineering realm (screen, gestures or voice), we look at how the humanitarian and military logistics teams collaborate: using physical maps. In this demo, we present our command center, which consists of a swarm of small tabletop robots used to visualize and control a fleet of flying robots. To ensure the scalabilty and robustness of our control system, we leverage decentralized behaviors written in a swarm-specific programming language. We set an example scenario, where the operator must command the fleet to search an area for simulated features of interest using the tabletop robots over a map. The actions of the operator send the flying robots to individual waypoint targets. Meanwhile, the command center monitors the operator: if he is not alone, he may lack focus, and the fleet thus switches to an autonomous deployment mode until the operator's full attention is back.