FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING HUMAN COGNITION IN OPERATIONALLY-RELEVANT HUMAN SWARM INTERACTION

For a wide variety of envisioned humanitarian and commercial applications that involve a human user commanding a swarm of robotic systems, developing human-swarm interaction (HSI) principles and interfaces calls for systematic virtual environments to study such HSI implementations. Specifically, such studies are fundamental to achieving HSI that is operationally efficient and can facilitate trust calibration through the collection–use–modeling of cognitive information. However, there is a lack of such virtual environments, especially in the context of studying HSI in different operationally relevant contexts. Building on our previous work in swarm simulation and computer game-based HSI, this paper develops a comprehensive virtual environment to study HSI under varying swarm size, swarm compliance, and swarm-to-human feedback. This paper demonstrates how this simulation environment informs the development of an indoor physical (experimentation) environment to evaluate the human cognitive model. New approaches are presented to simulate physical assets based on physical experiment-based calibration and the effects that this presents on the human users.Key features of the simulation environment include medium fidelity simulation of large teams of small aerial and ground vehicles (based on the Pybullet engine), a graphical user interface to receive human command and provide feedback (from swarm assets) to human in the case of non-compliance with commands, and a lab-streaming layer to synchronize physiological data collection (e.g., related to brain activity and eye gaze) with swarm state and human commands.