Freehand Sketching for End-User Programming of Robot Swarms

Abstract:Robot swarms are increasingly used in applications where accessible interaction with non-expert users is desirable. This paper investigates freehand sketching as an end-user programming interface for specifying robot swarm geometries. Users communicate spatial intent through a drawing, while the swarm autonomously extracts target formation points, constructs a rigid formation graph, assigns robots to formation nodes, and executes distributed formation control with a guarantee against unintended reflected formations. The resulting sketch-to-swarm framework is evaluated through a human study examining the usability of freehand formation specification. Twenty participants generated $42$ geometric shapes, and the interface achieved a mean System Usability Scale score of $84.25$, which conventionally indicates high perceived usability. The results support freehand sketching as an intuitive interaction abstraction for human-swarm collaboration without requiring robotics or programming expertise.

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2609.11078 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.11078v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.11078 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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