Human-Friendly Multi-Robot Systems: Legibility Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the concept of legibility of a multi-robot system. Considering a group of mobile robots moving in the environment according to an artificial potential based control law, we study the effect of the choice of the control parameters on the legibility of the system. With the term legibility we refer to the ability of the multi-robot system to communicate to a user: in particular, we consider a user who shares the environment with the robots, and is requested to understand what is the goal position the multi-robot system is moving to. We analyze the effect of the choice of a few design parameters, named motion-variables, performing a set of user studies in a virtual reality setup, with experiments based on the central composite design method.