1. A Multi-Touch Display for Robotic Team Control
Andrew Ng
Stanford University
Students: Morgan Quigley, Tony Ricciardi, Ashley Wellman.

2. How can a small number of human operators control a large swarm of robots?

3. Motivation rescue and search missions dangerous environments
unmanned battlefield units
hazardous materials

4. The Hardware

5. The Interface similar to real-time strategy video games
incorporates multi-touch gestures

6. Touch Gestures
two-finger zoom and pan
path-drawing

7. Potential Problems correcting paths that go through obstacles
coordinating paths for multiple robots
avoiding information overload
recognizing when a command is unsafe and should be ignored or modified

8. Paths Through Obstacles
(portions at 2x speed)

9. Paths Through Obstacles
uses a specialized cost function to find a valid path that captures the user’s intent

10. Coordinating Paths Current algorithm uses combination of heuristics.
e.g., If there is a room nearby, go there and wait for other robot to pass.
Other possible approaches:
Modify cost function to take into account paths of nearby robots.
Treat group of robots as one robot with many degrees of freedom, and find roadmap for composite robot.

11. Information Overload
Can’t display all sensor data for all robots at once.
Still want operator to have situational awareness.

12. Short-Term Goals Explore different path-coordination algorithms.
Add context menu for accessing sensor data and issuing special commands.
Get system working with iRobot hardware.

13. Long-Term Goals Scale up to environments with many robots.
Support more advanced robot hardware.
Extend gestures to use different parts of hand.
Extend interface to support collaboration between multiple operators.