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Using virtual reality to control swarms of autonomous agents

Published: 16 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Current two dimensional methods of controlling large numbers of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) have limitations such as a human's ability to track, efficiently control, and keep situational awareness on large numbers of sUASs. The 2017 DARPA-sponsored Service Academies Swarm Challenge inspired research producing novel command and control techniques that utilize a virtual reality (VR) environment and a multimodal interface. A swarm commander using this approach can select one sUAS, a sub-swarm, or even the entire swarm and assign that grouping a behavior to be carried out autonomously. This immersive VR environment improves situational awareness, optimizes command and control actions, reduces commander's task load, and ultimately provides a significant advantage over approaches that rely on traditional techniques.

References

[1]
Del Christman, Troy Weingart, and Traci Sarmiento. 2018. Hive Mentality for Autonomous Swarm Behaviors. In AUVSI XPONENTIAL.
[2]
T. H. Chung, M. R. Clement, M. A. Day, K. D. Jones, D. Davis, and M. Jones. 2016. Live-fly, large-scale field experimentation for large numbers of fixed-wing UAVs. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 1255--1262.
[3]
S. Gruber, R. Streeter, and G. York. 2015. Flexible multi-agent algorithm for distributed decision making. In 2015 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS). 9--17.

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  • (2024)Immersive Interaction Interface (I3): A Virtual Reality Swarm Control InterfaceIEEE Transactions on Field Robotics10.1109/TFR.2024.34999131(475-496)Online publication date: 2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICMI '18: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction: Adjunct
October 2018
62 pages
ISBN:9781450360029
DOI:10.1145/3281151
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 October 2018

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Author Tags

  1. autonomy
  2. command and control
  3. multimodal
  4. sUAS
  5. small unmanned aerial systems
  6. swarm
  7. unmanned aerial vehicles
  8. virtual reality

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Immersive Interaction Interface (I3): A Virtual Reality Swarm Control InterfaceIEEE Transactions on Field Robotics10.1109/TFR.2024.34999131(475-496)Online publication date: 2024

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