Task lists for human-multiple robot interaction

Interest in developing large multiple robot systems continues to grow, however, the autonomous technology to permit such systems to work on their own is lacking. Therefore, it is necessary to develop interaction capabilities that will permit a small number of humans to supervise a larger number of robots. The objective was to develop a preliminary interface that provided an ability to monitor and interact with teams of robots rather than individual robots. Specifically, this work focused on understanding how a task list would affect the human's interaction with the system. This paper describes the preliminary interface design, the user evaluation and the associated results. The interface has tools for creating robot teams for new tasks, managing teams, and attending to problems in teams. The primary interface feature is a task list that collects all relevant tasks and information from the environment in a single window, sorted by priority. Twenty novice users evaluated the system.