SwarmTouch: Tactile Interaction of Human with Impedance Controlled Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors

We propose a novel interaction strategy for a human-swarm communication when a human operator guides a formation of quadrotors with impedance control and receives vibrotactile feedback. The presented approach takes into account the human hand velocity and changes the formation shape and dynamics accordingly using impedance interlinks simulated between quadrotors, which helps to achieve a life-like swarm behavior. Experimental results with Crazyflie 2.0 quadrotor platform validate the proposed control algorithm. The tactile patterns representing dynamics of the swarm (extension or contraction) are proposed. The user feels the state of the swarm at his fingertips and receives valuable information to improve the controllability of the complex life-like formation. The user study revealed the patterns with high recognition rates. Subjects stated that tactile sensation improves the ability to guide the drone formation and makes the human-swarm communication much more interactive. The proposed technology can potentially have a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction, providing a new level of intuitiveness and immersion into the swarm navigation.Comment: \c{opyright} 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1909.0229

SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms

We propose a novel system SwarmCloak for landing of a fleet of four flying robots on the human arms using light-sensitive landing pads with vibrotactile feedback. We developed two types of wearable tactile displays with vibromotors which are activated by the light emitted from the LED array at the bottom of quadcopters. In a user study, participants were asked to adjust the position of the arms to land up to two drones, having only visual feedback, only tactile feedback or visual-tactile feedback. The experiment revealed that when the number of drones increases, tactile feedback plays a more important role in accurate landing and operator's convenience. An important finding is that the best landing performance is achieved with the combination of tactile and visual feedback. The proposed technology could have a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction, providing a new level of intuitiveness and engagement into the swarm deployment just right from the skin surface.Comment: ACM Siggraph Asia 2019 conference (Emerging Technologies section). Best Demo Award by committee member

Tactile Interaction of Human with Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors augmented with Adaptive Obstacle Avoidance

International audienceThis paper presents a human-robot interaction strategy to solve multiple agents path planning problem when a human operator guides a formation of quadrotors with impedance control and receives vibrotactile feedback. The proposed approach provides a solution based on a leader-followers architecture with a prescribed formation geometry that adapts dynamically to the environment and the operator. The presented approach takes into account the human hand velocity and changes the formation shape and dynamics accordingly using impedance interlinks simulated between quadrotors. The path generated by a human operator and impedance models is corrected with potential fields method that ensures robots trajectories to be collision-free, reshaping the geometry of the formation when required by environmental conditions (e.g. narrow passages). The tactile patterns representing the changing dynamics of the swarm are proposed. The user feels the state of the swarm at his fingertips and receives valuable information to improve the controllability of the complex formation. The proposed technology can potentially have a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction, providing a new level of intuitiveness and immersion into the swarm navigation