Deformable-medium affordances for interacting with multi-robot systems

This paper addresses the issue of human-swarm interactions by proposing a new set of affordances that make a multi-robot system amenable to human control. In particular, we propose to use clay — a deformable medium — as the “joystick” for controlling the swarm, supporting such affordances as stretching, splitting and merging, shaping, and mixing. The contribution beyond the formulation of these affordances is the coupling of an image recognition framework to decentralized control laws for the individual robots, and the developed human-swarm interaction methodology is applied to a team of mobile robots.