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Abstract

This talk will cover some recent theoretical and experimental results in the new topic of Bilateral Shared Control of Multiple Mobile Robots, with a special attention to the case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this non-conventional teleoperation field, a human operator partially controls the behavior of a semi-autonomous group of mobile robots by means of one or more haptic interfaces, and receives back a force cue informative of the swarm tracking performance and of additional properties of the surrounding environment (e.g., presence of obstacles or loss of group connectivity). This kind of systems is designed in order to enhance the telepresence of the operator and the quality of the human robot interaction, especially when applied to practical scenarios, like search and rescue, surveillance, exploration and mapping. The talk will first present an overview of the nature and kind of problems addressed within this research such as, e.g., how to design a stable bilateral interconnection between the user and a group of flying robots bound to maintain connectivity of the underlying interaction graph, but otherwise free to shape their formation because of additional constraints or sub-tasks. We will present theoretical and experimental results obtained on a group of quadrotor UAVs, and then discuss future research directions.