Toward haptic-based management of small swarms in cordon and patrol

Distributed teams of agents can provide robust solutions to many problems of interest, and allowing a human to influence and manage those agents can extend the range of problems that can be solved while improving the team's efficiency. Within this context, it is interesting to develop methods for interaction that are intuitive and that utilize haptic interaction so that the human manager need not be "heads down" in a graphical user interface. This paper presents a set of agent control algorithms that yield useful team performance and enable haptic-based management of team behaviors. A preliminary demonstration of the system is also presented.