University of Southampton

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 a ”Human And Robot Interactive Swarm” (HARIS) platform that has recently won the best demonstration award at the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Our platform allows multi-user interaction with a robot swarm and facilitates qualitative and quantitative user studies through the simulation of robot swarms completing tasks, from package delivery to search and rescue, with varying levels of human control.

We show the performance gain offered by maintaining a ``human-in-the-loop’’ over a fully autonomous system.

This is illustrated in the context of search and rescue, with an autonomous allocation of resources to those in need.