The Design of Interfaces for Multi-Robot Path Planning and Control

The field of human-robot interaction has evolved beyond issues concerning the design and development of one person controlling one robot to exploring HRI for groups of robots and teams. Our design research explores biologically-inspired motion that is initiated by a human operator, applied to a single or a small group of robots, and used to affect the motion and path planning of another subset of robots. This exploratory design study first created a taxonomy to categorize individual robot motions, looking at how they could be categorized and used as building blocks. We then combined individual motions with time and velocity as design variables to guide our interaction design. This work led to the development of a prototype set of motions, which was applied in the development of an iPad interface. We informally evaluated this prototype with nine participants. We present challenges and design recommendations based on this effort.