Symposium Overview
Robotic systems composed important of a large number of robots, often called robot swarms, are envisioned to play an increasingly role in applications such as search, rescue, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations. Nowadays, many mobile robots that are deployed for such applications are still tele-operated by a single or multiple operators. While these platforms are individually very capable, the development of cheaper hardware allows the consideration of swarm systems composed many more robots but with each individual being far less powerful. To control such systems is a considerable challenge due to the limitations of each individual robot and the sheer number of robots that need to be coordinated to successfully complete a mission. Autonomous algorithms provide an opportunity to mitigate some of the complexity an operator faces in controlling such swarms. But it is not clear which tasks will ultimately fall to the operator and which should rather be solved by the autonomy.
