Passivity-based bilateral human-swarm-interactions for cooperative robotic networks and human passivity analysis

This paper investigates bilateral human-swarm-interactions wherein the objective is to guarantee human operator enabled synchronization of positions/velocities of an ensemble of kinematic robots to desired reference inputs. We first present a feedback loop configuration, where every robot implements a cooperative controller and the human visually feedbacks the average positions/velocities of the accessible robots depending on the selected (position or velocity) control modes. Asymptotic synchronization is demonstrated by assuming passivity of an appropriately defined human operator decision process. The aforementioned passivity assumption and learning ability of the operator are studied through experiments on a human-in-the-loop simulator. It is observed that learning has a positive effect on passivity, but passivity of the decision process may nevertheless be violated in the high frequency domain depending on the network connection. Hence, passivation scheme is presented for the operator's decision process and it is demonstrated for three different interconnection structures among the kinematic robots and operator.