Human-Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges for Real World Applications

In multi-robot systems, a collection of robotic units work together to accomplish complex tasks, which may entail coordinated motion control, information communication, distributed sensing and computation. In addition, a human operator capable of interacting with the team of robots may provide a significant contribution, in particular in terms of high-level reasoning, based on the information received by the robots. The employment of such human-multi-robot systems is advantageous in many applications, ranging from environmental exploration and monitoring to search and rescue, from sustainable agriculture to entertainment. This form of human-multi-robot interaction poses challenging research questions such as “What level of autonomy is suitable for a given human-multi-robot application?”, “What kind of interface allows humans to effectively interact with a robot team to perform a coordinated task?”, “How can high-level cognitive capabilities of humans be interpreted, coded, transferred, and leveraged by multi-robot systems?”, “How should tasks be allocated within collaborative human-robot teams?”, “What task representation is suitable for human-in-the-loop coordination of multi-robot systems?” The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry focusing on human-multi-robot interaction, with expertise ranging from mechanical design to control systems, from perception to robot learning. Through invited talks, interactive presentations, and discussion sessions, the main objectives of the workshop are fostering discussions, creating collaborations, and identifying the main challenges in this research field with the final goal of enabling the design and deployment of human-multi-robot systems in more and more real-world applications.