Human-multi-robot team collaboration using advising agents

The number of multi-robot systems deployed in field applications has risen dramatically over the years. Nevertheless, the part of the human operator in these systems has been mostly overlooked. In this work we propose a novel approach for utilizing automated advising agents when assisting an operator to better manage a team of multiple robots in complex environments. We introduce an advice provision methodology and exemplify its implementation using automated advising agents in two real-world human-multi-robot team collaboration tasks: the Search And Rescue (SAR) task and the warehouse operation task. Our intelligent advising agents were evaluated through extensive field trials, with over 100 human operators and both simulated and physical mobile robots, and showed a significant improvement in the team's performance.