Adaptable Platform for Interactive Swarm Robotics (APIS): A Human-Swarm Interaction Research Testbed

Abstract

This paper describes the Adaptable Platform for Interactive Swarm robotics (APIS) - a testbed designed to accelerate development in human-swarm interaction (HSI) research. Specifically, this paper presents the design of a swarm robot platform composed of fifty low cost robots coupled with a testing field and a software architecture that allows for modular and versatile development of swarm algorithms. The motivation behind developing this platform is that the emergence of a swarm's collective behavior can be difficult to predict and control. However, human-swarm interaction can measurably increase a swarm's performance as the human operator may have intuition or knowledge unavailable to the swarm. The development of APIS allows researchers to focus on HSI research, without being constrained to a fixed ruleset or interface. A short survey is presented that offers a taxonomy of swarm platforms and provides conclusions that contextualize the development of APIS. Next, the motivations, design and functionality of the APIS testbed are described. Finally, the operation and potential of the platform are demonstrated through two experimental evaluations.