Robot swarms and AR visualization

ARTUISIS - Augmented Reality and Tangible User Interface to Supervise and Interact with robot Swarms

Last updated on Jul 17, 2024

Project funded by the French National Research Agency, led by Jérémy Rivière

Abstract

Robot swarms are decentralized systems, composed of a large number of small and autonomous robots, capable of collective exploration, movement coordination, or dynamic task distribution among themselves. These capabilities usually come from bio-inspired of physics-inspired algorithms which define the behavior of a robot according to its state at time t and its perception and action capabilities, the global behavior of the swarm emerging from local interactions between these robots.

By their very nature, robot swarms exhibit properties of self-organisation, robustness, and ability to scale. that are very useful, but which make supervision (visualisation and understanding) and control by a human operator very difficult. The very source of these properties, the emergence of the swarm behaviour from the interactions between the robots, prevents the operator from maintaining a correct mental model of this behaviour over time.

The ARTUISIS project focuses on the basic behaviours that lead to the spatial self-organisation of robot swarms, such as flocking, aggregation or area coverage. It aims at allowing an operator to:

Understand the core mechanisms of this self-organisation,
Supervise the behaviour dynamics,
Affect the spatial self-organisation in an intuitive, ergonomic and efficient way.

People involved

Principal investigator

Jérémy Rivière

Jérémy Rivière is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Brittany (UBO) and member of the INUIT team. He is the principal investigator of the ARTUISIS project.

Researchers

Gilles Coppin

Gilles Coppin is Professor of Computer Science at IMT Atlantique and member of the INUIT team. His roles involve both teaching and conducting pioneering research, particularly in the areas of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence

Sébastien Kubicki

Sébastien Kubicki is an Associate Professor at the Brest National Engineering School (ENIB) and member of the INUIT team. His research focuses on natural human-system interaction and tangible interfaces.

PhD Student

Aymeric Henard

Aymeric Henard is a PhD student in the Lab-STICC laboratory, part of the INUIT team. His thesis, “Augmented Reality and Tangible Interaction to Supervise and Interact with a Swarm of Robots,” explores how robot swarms self-organize and collaborate, drawing inspiration from animal behaviors like fish schooling. His goal is to understand these systems, make them comprehensible, and enable user control via tangible interfaces.