Effects of the Interaction with Robot Swarms on the Human Psychological State

Human-swarm interaction studies how human beings can interact with a robotswarm---a large number of robots cooperating with each other without any form of centralizedcontrol. In today's human-swarm interaction literature, the large majority of the works investigatehow human beings can issue commands to and receive feedback from a robot swarm. However, only a few ofthese works study the effect of the interaction with a robot swarm on human psychology (e.g. on thehuman stress or on the human workload). Understanding human psychology in human-swarm interaction isimportant because the human psychological state can have significant impact on the way humansinteract with robot swarms (e.g. a high level of stress can cause a human operator to freeze in themiddle of a critical task, such as a search-and-rescue task). Most existing works that study human psychology in human-swarm interaction conduct their experimentsusing robot swarms simulated on a computer screen. The use of simulation is convenient becauseexperimental conditions can be repeated perfectly in different experimental runs and becauseexperimentation using real robots is expensive both in money and time. However, simulation suffersfrom the so-called reality gap: the inherent discrepancy between simulation and reality. Itis therefore important to study whether this inherent discrepancy can affect humanpsychology---human operators interacting with a simulated robot swarm can react differently thanwhen interacting with a real robot swarm.A large literature in human-robot interaction has studied the psychological impact of theinteraction between human beings and single robots. This literature could in principle be highlyrelevant to human-swarm interaction. However, an inherent difference between human-robot interactionand human-swarm interaction is that in the latter, human operators interact with a large number ofrobots. This large number of robots can affect human psychology---human operators interacting with alar
Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished