Visual feedback with multiple cameras in a UAVs Human–Swarm Interface

• The implementation of a novel Human–Swarm interface for UAVs.
• Analysis of the effects of different visual feedbacks on the performances.
• A first-person POV is suitable for some typologies of simple tasks.
• If the task is complex, exocentric cameras increase the user’s performance.
• Camera configurations can have an impact on the resulting performance.

In all situations in which a wide area has to be monitored, a practice emerging in recent years consists in using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and in particular multirotors. Even if many steps forward have been taken toward the fully autonomous control of UAVs, a human pilot is usually in charge of controlling the robots. However, teleoperating UAVs can become a hard task whenever it is necessary to deploy a swarm of robots instead of a single unit, to the end of increasing the area under observation. In this case, the organization of robots in a structured formation may reduce the effort of the operator to control the swarm.When controlling a team of robots, the typology of visual feedback is crucial. It is known that, while overall awareness and pattern recognition are optimized by exocentric views, i.e., with cameras from above the swarm, the immediate environment is often better viewed egocentrically, i.e., with cameras on board the robots.In this article we present the implementation of a human–robot interface for the control of a swarm of UAVs, with a focus on the analysis of the effects of different visual feedbacks on the performance of human operators.