Papers for

interactive system designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Freehand sketching simplifies programming of robot swarm shapes

Freehand Sketching for End-User Programming of Robot Swarms

Abstract: Robot swarms are increasingly used in applications where accessible interaction with non-expert users is desirable. This paper investigates freehand sketching as an end-user programming interface for specifying robot swarm geometries. Users communicate spatial intent through a drawing, while the swarm autonomously extracts target formation points, constructs a rigid formation graph, assigns robots to formation nodes, and executes distributed formation control with a guarantee against unintended reflected formations. The resulting sketch-to-swarm framework is evaluated through a human study examining the usability of freehand formation specification. Twenty participants generated $42$ geometric shapes, and the interface achieved a mean System Usability Scale score of $84.25$, which conventionally indicates high perceived usability. The results support freehand sketching as an intuitive interaction abstraction for human-swarm collaboration without requiring robotics or programming expertise.

Thu 10 SeptRobotics
The gist
Drawing is a natural way for people to show how they want groups of robots to arrange themselves. The authors developed a system where users sketch a shape by hand, and the robot swarm figures out where each robot should go to match the drawing. This system avoids confusing robot formations by making sure the shape is not mistakenly flipped. In tests, people found the sketching system easy and natural to use, even without robot or programming knowledge.
Open 2609.11078v1