Just How Many Robots Can One Person Control at Once? A DARPA project overturns longstanding assumptions
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.
Swarms of autonomous robots are increasingly being tested and deployed in complex missions, yet a certain level of human oversight during these missions is still required. Which means a major question remains: How many robots—and how complex a mission—can a single human manage before becoming overwhelmed?
In a study funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), experts show that humans can single-handedly and effectively manage a heterogenous swarm of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial vehicles, while feeling overwhelmed only for brief periods of time during an overall small portion of the mission. For instance, in a particularly challenging, multiday experiment in an urban setting, human controllers were overloaded with the workload only 3 percent of the time. The results were published 19 November in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics.