

Show HN: Help test out swarm robot control - angersock
http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/

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angersock
This experiment is the result of several months of back and forth with my good
friend and collaborator Aaron.

The goal is to test several different control and visualization schemes for
swarms of robots, and to gather quantitative data about what mechanisms help
people work with these swarms most effectively.

Secondarily, we've created a simple platform for publishing these academic UX
projects online--why settle merely for a handful of undergrads to sample with?
We'd like to advance the state of the art a bit in experimentation.

All results are available as CSV or JSON from the results page, and we'll be
posting up a link to the project source soon so that other people can learn
from our work and extend it.

Thank you everyone here for giving me the feedback and motivation to start
doing web stuff--without this community, I wouldn't have either the skills or
motivation to pursue fun projects like this.

EDIT: We appreciate any feedback that we get, good or bad. Thanks again!

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sbashyal
I proposed an approach for human swarm interaction in my Master's thesis [1]
and published a conference paper based on the research [2]. I wonder if you
have come across my work and would like to discuss it if you are interested.

[1]
[https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/27879](https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/27879)
[2]
[http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~mike/mikeg/papers/MOSC/Bashyal_09...](http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~mike/mikeg/papers/MOSC/Bashyal_09007dcc80600f1e.pdf)

~~~
AaronBecker
Your paper is interesting. Can you share a link to a video of your simulator
in action? Better, is the code still live? It appears that you allowed the
user to switch modes between global commands and "attract/repulse". What modes
did the users prefer?

The term "assistive swarming" is intriguing. In future work, we'd like to
simulate interacting with an intelligent swarm, perhaps a group of Boids
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids)).
Our current work is inspired by micro/nano setups by colleagues here at Rice,
and RPI, Drexel, and Harvard -- see the videos page for an overview:
[http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/videos](http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/videos)

~~~
sbashyal
Here is the video for radiation source localization problem:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKofA3ygvPA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKofA3ygvPA)

And here are two other use cases:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rxqItJFeY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rxqItJFeY)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrq6nq3FLmo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrq6nq3FLmo)

This was all done in Matlab as that was the preferred platform for my lab.

~~~
AaronBecker
Nice -- the transparent paths are effective for showing the explored area.

Lately I've started sharing code from my papers -- is your code available?
Matlab code is easily shared at MatlabCentral:
[http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/...](http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/74496)
(my page).

