On the Timing of Operator Commands for the Navigation of a Robot Swarm

A human-swarm interactive system has been shown to benefit from neglect benevolence. This means if the human interacts too often with a swarm of robots, it will degrade its performance in achieving the operational goal. Past works have focused on human-swarm interaction (HSI) for reaching rendezvous points. In this paper, we aim to establish neglect benevolence for realignment in a leader-follower Cucker-Smale system. The human operator issues heading commands to the leader and the follower robots tries to realign with the leader through Cucker-Smale model dynamics. Simulation results show that there is a minimum time interval that the operator should wait before issuing a new heading command in order for the swarm to remain in a flocking state.