Balancing Human and Inter-Agent Influences for Shared Control of Bio-Inspired Collectives

Abstract

Human interaction with bio-inspired collectives provides an interesting setting for studying shared control. A human will often have knowledge of global objectives and high-level plans, but the collective will often have more detailed lower-level knowledge about the particulars of the situation at hand. Thus it is important to understand how control can be appropriately shared between the human and the collective. We analyze human interaction with bio-inspired collectives using graph theory, and propose that there are two human-side elements that determine how well control is shared: span and persistence. We additionally propose that there is a collective-side element that determines how well control is shared: connectivity . We study two examples of shared-control between a human and a bio-inspired collective: shaping a spatial formation and causing a collective to switch between stable collective states. Our empirical results show that span, persistence, and connectivity combine to affect (1) how influence is shared between the human and the collective and (2) the resulting success of human-collective interactions.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2014
Accession Number
ADA619495

Entities

People

  • Daniel S. Brown
  • Michael A Goodrich
  • Shin-young Jung

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computer Science
  • Contracts
  • Fragmentation
  • Human-Swarm Interaction
  • Information Operations
  • Mathematics
  • Monitoring
  • Network Topology
  • Oil Spills
  • Orientation (Direction)
  • Shape
  • Simulations
  • Switches
  • Switching
  • Topology

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.