On Collective Manual Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots

A method is described for a human operator to control collective movements of an autonomous mobile robot swarm. It employs virtual interactive forces among individual robots to form and maintain the swarm. In this paper, after reviewing the outline of basic scheme, a command pre-compensator is introduced that enables to specify dynamics of individual robots and the center of the swarm independently. Then, effects of parameters of both dynamics on maneuverability are analyzed theoretically and through experiments using a newly developed swarm simulator. The well-known theory on dynamics of a human operator in a manual control system is extended to the collective manual control system of the present scheme. Finally, the validity of the scheme is confirmed by manual path following experiments over a field with obstacles using the simulator.