Toward haptic-based management of small swarms in cordon and patrol

Distributed teams of agents can provide robust solutions to many problems of interest, and allowing a human to influence and manage those agents can extend the range of problems that can be solved while improving the team´s efficiency. Within this context, it is interesting to develop methods for interaction that are intuitive and that utilize haptic interaction so that the human manager need not be "heads down" in a graphical user interface. This paper presents a set of agent control algorithms that yield useful team performance and enable haptic-based management of team behaviors. A preliminary demonstration of the system is also presented.