Two variations of passivity-short-based semi-autonomous robotic swarms

Presence of a human operator in cooperation with a robotic swarm could enhance the mission performance and accommodate the sudden changes in environments or the goals. This paper investigates two similar architectures for a semi-autonomous robotic swarm under a passivity-short assumption of the human operator. The two architectures differ only in the visual feedback given to the human operator. In addition, we present the proofs that both architectures ensure the objective which is position/velocity synchronization of the robotic swarm to references determined by the human. Further analysis in differences between both architectures is then presented, by considering the same velocity command from the human operator and inspecting the visual feedbacks of each architecture. In addition, the effects on the transparency of all robots' actual trajectories to the visual feedback are also discussed. Finally, investigation involving several test-subjects is conducted by using human-in-the-loop simulation to investigate human responses on both architectures.