Augmented Reality for Human-Swarm Interaction in a Swarm-Robotic Chemistry Simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an augmented reality system for visualizing and identifying individual robots within a swarm during a chemistry simulation, enabling better understanding of swarm dynamics and topology.

Contribution

It presents a distributed color and blinking scheme for robot identification, modeled as a graph coloring problem, integrated with AR visualization for swarm chemistry.

Findings

Distributed coloring scheme effectively identifies swarm members.

AR visualization reveals internal states and topological relationships.

Approach enables real-time, intuitive understanding of swarm behavior.

Abstract

We present a method to register individual members of a robotic swarm in an augmented reality display while showing relevant information about swarm dynamics to the user that would be otherwise hidden. Individual swarm members and clusters of the same group are identified by their color, and by blinking at a specific time interval that is distinct from the time interval at which their neighbors blink. We show that this problem is an instance of the graph coloring problem, which can be solved in a distributed manner in O(log(n)) time. We demonstrate our approach using a swarm chemistry simulation in which robots simulate individual atoms that form molecules following the rules of chemistry. Augmented reality is then used to display information about the internal state of individual swarm members as well as their topological relationship, corresponding to molecular bonds.