Autonomy Spectrum and Performance Perception Issues in Swarm Supervisory Control

This paper proposes a two-part contribution to the human factor issues raised by the prospect of the deployment of swarms of autonomous robots under the supervision of a human operator. First, we propose a generic framework for system description that allows us to analyze and guide the design of automated systems. Second, we analyze the way some highly adaptive systems such as swarms can be perceived by operators, and especially the way representational gaps between man and machine can impact global performances.