Conversational Language Models for Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Robot Coordination

With the increasing prevalence and diversity of robots interacting in the real world, there is need for flexible, on-the-fly planning and cooperation. Large Language Models are starting to be explored in a multimodal setup for communication, coordination, and planning in robotics. Existing approaches generally use a single agent building a plan, or have multiple homogeneous agents coordinating for a simple task. We present a decentralised, dialogical approach in which a team of agents with different abilities plans solutions through peer-to-peer and human-robot discussion. We suggest that argument-style dialogues are an effective way to facilitate adaptive use of each agent's abilities within a cooperative team. Two robots discuss how to solve a cleaning problem set by a human, define roles, and agree on paths they each take. Each step can be interrupted by a human advisor and agents check their plans with the human. Agents then execute this plan in the real world, collecting rubbish from people in each room. Our implementation uses text at every step, maintaining transparency and effective human-multi-robot interaction.

The Effect of Predictive Formal Modelling at Runtime on Performance in Human-Swarm Interaction

Formal Modelling is often used as part of the design and testing process of software development to ensure that components operate within suitable bounds even in unexpected circumstances. In this paper, we use predictive formal modelling (PFM) at runtime in a human-swarm mission and show that this integration can be used to improve the performance of human-swarm teams. We recruited 60 participants to operate a simulated aerial swarm to deliver parcels to target locations. In the PFM condition, operators were informed of the estimated completion times given the number of drones deployed, whereas in the No-PFM condition, operators did not have this information. The operators could control the mission by adding or removing drones from the mission and thereby, increasing or decreasing the overall mission cost. The evaluation of human-swarm performance relied on four key metrics: the time taken to complete tasks, the number of agents involved, the total number of tasks accomplished, and the overall cost associated with the human-swarm task. Our results show that PFM modelling at runtime improves mission performance without significantly affecting the operator's workload or the system's usability.

The Effect of Data Visualisation Quality and Task Density on Human-Swarm Interaction

Despite the advantages of having robot swarms, human supervision is required for real-world applications. The performance of the human-swarm system depends on several factors including the data availability for the human operators. In this paper, we study the human factors aspect of the human-swarm interaction and investigate how having access to high-quality data can affect the performance of the human-swarm system - the number of tasks completed and the human trust level in operation. We designed an experiment where a human operator is tasked to operate a swarm to identify casualties in an area within a given time period. One group of operators had the option to request high-quality pictures while the other group had to base their decision on the available low-quality images. We performed a user study with 120 participants and recorded their success rate (directly logged via the simulation platform) as well as their workload and trust level (measured through a questionnaire after completing a human-swarm scenario). The findings from our study indicated that the group granted access to high-quality data exhibited an increased workload and placed greater trust in the swarm, thus confirming our initial hypothesis. However, we also found that the number of accurately identified casualties did not significantly vary between the two groups, suggesting that data quality had no impact on the successful completion of tasks.

Demonstrating Performance Benefits of Human-Swarm Teaming

Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot swarms to real-world applications. Human operators can define goals for the swarm, monitor their performance and interfere with, or overrule, the decisions and behaviour. We present the ``Human And Robot Interactive Swarm'' simulator (HARIS) that allows multi-user interaction with a robot swarm and facilitates qualitative and quantitative user studies through simulation of robot swarms completing tasks, from package delivery to search and rescue, with varying levels of human control. In this demonstration, we showcase the simulator by using it to study the performance gain offered by maintaining a ``human-in-the-loop'' over a fully autonomous system as an example. This is illustrated in the context of search and rescue, with an autonomous allocation of resources to those in need.