The HERD Project: Human-Multi-Robot Interaction in Search & Rescue and in Farming

Large-scale multi-robot systems have numerous potential real-world applications. It is, however, still unclear how a human operator can effectively engage and control a system composed of multiple autonomous robots, especially in unstructured and outdoor environments. This paper reports on ongoing work in the project HERD — Human-AI Collaboration: Engaging and Controlling Swarms of Robots and Drones, in which we focus on two concrete use cases from industrial partners, namely farming and search & rescue. One of the industrial partners, Agro Intelligence ApS, currently sells autonomous farming robots, while the other, Robotto ApS, develops autonomous drone-based monitoring solutions for emergency responders. Both partners aim to scale their technologies to multi-robot/multi-drone operations. In this paper, we present the two use cases, their differences and similarities, challenges and preliminary results.