An Experiment on Squad Navigation of Human and Robots

Mobile robots are nowadays capable of navigating in a semi-structured environment, either alone or in formations. Dealing with mobile obstacles, e.g. persons, in everyday environments poses additional challenges which are being addressed by the research community. This paper presents an experiment with a set of robots -acting as a swarm- and one person. The aim of such robot-human squad is to explore an unmapped area indoors. The swarm is programmed such that obstacle avoidance, robot avoidance and human avoidance is combined with staying in the vicinity of the human and gradually proceeding towards the end point. The robots are provided with enough sensors to perform avoidance, and determine/estimate the distance to the human. Communication is one-way only, from robots to human. The aim of the experiment is to provide insights about the real problems of the multirobot system when dealing with a non-expert person in a cooperative exploration task.