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Recent advances in robotics bring us closer to the reality of living, co-habiting, and sharing personal spaces with robots. However, it is not clear how close a co-located robot can be to a human in a shared environment without making the human uncomfortable or anxious. This research aims to map safe and comfortable zones for co-located aerial robots. The objective is to identify the distances at which a drone causes discomfort to a co-located human and to create a map showing no-fly, moderate-fly, and safe-fly zones. We recruited a total of 18 participants and conducted two indoor laboratory experiments, one with a single drone and the other set with two drones. Our results show that multiple drones cause more discomfort when close to a co-located human than a single drone. We observed that distances below 200 cm caused discomfort, the moderate fly zone was 200 - 300 cm, and the safe-fly zone was any distance greater than 300 cm in single drone experiments. The safe zones were pushed further away by 100 cm for the multiple drone experiments. In this paper, we present the preliminary findings on safe-fly zones for multiple drones. Further work would investigate the impact of a higher number of aerial robots, the speed of approach, direction of travel, and noise level on co-located humans, and autonomously develop 3D models of trust zones and safe zones for co-located aerial swarms., Comment: This paper has been accepted for presentation at the Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS '24), being held from September 16-18, 2024, at Austin, TX, USA. It consists of 10 pages, 9 figures, and 1 table

Swarm robotics is a study of simple robots that exhibit complex behaviour only by interacting locally with other robots and their environment. The control in swarm robotics is mainly distributed whereas centralised control is widely used in other fields of robotics. Centralised and decentralised control strategies both pose a unique set of benefits and drawbacks for the control of multi-robot systems. While decentralised systems are more scalable and resilient, they are less efficient compared to the centralised systems and they lead to excessive data transmissions to the human operators causing cognitive overload. We examine the trade-offs of each of these approaches in a human-swarm system to perform an environmental monitoring task and propose a flexible hybrid approach, which combines elements of hierarchical and decentralised systems. We find that a flexible hybrid system can outperform a centralised system (in our environmental monitoring task by 19.2%) while reducing the number of messages sent to a human operator (here by 23.1%). We conclude that establishing centralisation for a system is not always optimal for performance and that utilising aspects of centralised and decentralised systems can keep the swarm from hindering its performance., Comment: The International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2024)

Understanding collective behavior and how it evolves is important to ensure that robot swarms can be trusted in a shared environment. One way to understand the behavior of the swarm is through collective behavior reconstruction using prior demonstrations. Existing approaches often require access to the swarm controller which may not be available. We reconstruct collective behaviors in distinct swarm scenarios involving shared environments without using swarm controller information. We achieve this by transforming prior demonstrations into features that describe multi-agent interactions before behavior reconstruction with multi-agent generative adversarial imitation learning (MA-GAIL). We show that our approach outperforms existing algorithms in spatial organization, and can be used to observe and reconstruct a swarm's behavior for further analysis and testing, which might be impractical or undesirable on the original robot swarm., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for presentation at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)

Embodied robots which can interact with their environment and neighbours are increasingly being used as a test case to develop Artificial Intelligence. This creates a need for multimodal robot controllers that can operate across different types of information, including text. Large Language Models are able to process and generate textual as well as audiovisual data and, more recently, robot actions. Language Models are increasingly being applied to robotic systems; these Language-Based robots leverage the power of language models in a variety of ways. Additionally, the use of language opens up multiple forms of information exchange between members of a human-robot team. This survey motivates the use of language models in robotics, and then delineates works based on the part of the overall control flow in which language is incorporated. Language can be used by human to task a robot, by a robot to inform a human, between robots as a human-like communication medium, and internally for a robot's planning and control. Applications of language-based robots are explored, and numerous limitations and challenges are discussed to provide a summary of the development needed for the future of language-based robotics., Comment: Links to each paper and, if available, source code are made available at the accompanying site: https://sooratilab.com/publications/2024/A-Survey-of-Language-BasedCommunication-in-Robotics.php

One of the challenges of human-swarm interaction (HSI) is how to manage the operator's workload. In order to do this, we propose a novel neurofeedback technique for the real-time measurement of workload using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The objective is to develop a baseline for workload measurement in human-swarm interaction using fNIRS and to develop an interface that dynamically adapts to the operator's workload. The proposed method consists of using fNIRS device to measure brain activity, process this through a machine learning algorithm, and pass it on to the HSI interface. By dynamically adapting the HSI interface, the swarm operator's workload could be reduced and the performance improved., Comment: This paper consist of 3 pages and contains 2 figures. This abstract paper was presented at the "Breaking Swarm Stereotypes" workshop of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in PACIFICO Yokohama, Japan, held from May 13th to 17th, 2024. https://hauertlab.com/breaking-swarm-stereotypes-workshop-icra-2024/

In this paper, we present a novel sequential team selection model in soccer. Specifically, we model the stochastic process of player injury and unavailability using player-specific information learned from real-world soccer data. Monte-Carlo Tree Search is used to select teams for games that optimise long-term team performance across a soccer season by reasoning over player injury probability. We validate our approach compared to benchmark solutions for the 2018/19 English Premier League season. Our model achieves similar season expected points to the benchmark whilst reducing first-team injuries by ~13% and the money inefficiently spent on injured players by ~11% - demonstrating the potential to reduce costs and improve player welfare in real-world soccer teams., Comment: 19 pages (16 main, 2 references, 1 appendix), 10 figures (9 main, 1 appendix). Accepted at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference 2024 Research Paper Competition

Formal Modelling is often used as part of the design and testing process of software development to ensure that components operate within suitable bounds even in unexpected circumstances. In this paper, we use predictive formal modelling (PFM) at runtime in a human-swarm mission and show that this integration can be used to improve the performance of human-swarm teams. We recruited 60 participants to operate a simulated aerial swarm to deliver parcels to target locations. In the PFM condition, operators were informed of the estimated completion times given the number of drones deployed, whereas in the No-PFM condition, operators did not have this information. The operators could control the mission by adding or removing drones from the mission and thereby, increasing or decreasing the overall mission cost. The evaluation of human-swarm performance relied on four key metrics: the time taken to complete tasks, the number of agents involved, the total number of tasks accomplished, and the overall cost associated with the human-swarm task. Our results show that PFM modelling at runtime improves mission performance without significantly affecting the operator's workload or the system's usability., Comment: This work has been accepted in HRI '24 LBR track. It consist of 5 pages, 2 figures, and 2 tables. This is the author's submitted manuscript, for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record will be published in the Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '24 Companion), https://doi.org/10.1145/3610978.3640725

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a critical task for performing global re-localization in visual perception systems. It requires the ability to accurately recognize a previously visited location under variations such as illumination, occlusion, appearance and viewpoint. In the case of robotic systems and augmented reality, the target devices for deployment are battery powered edge devices. Therefore whilst the accuracy of VPR methods is important so too is memory consumption and latency. Recently new works have focused on the recall@1 metric as a performance measure with limited focus on resource utilization. This has resulted in methods that use deep learning models too large to deploy on low powered edge devices. We hypothesize that these large models are highly over-parameterized and can be optimized to satisfy the constraints of a low powered embedded system whilst maintaining high recall performance. Our work studies the impact of compact convolutional network architecture design in combination with full-precision and mixed-precision post-training quantization on VPR performance. Importantly we not only measure performance via the recall@1 score but also measure memory consumption and latency. We characterize the design implications on memory, latency and recall scores and provide a number of design recommendations for VPR systems under these resource limitations.

Despite the advantages of having robot swarms, human supervision is required for real-world applications. The performance of the human-swarm system depends on several factors including the data availability for the human operators. In this paper, we study the human factors aspect of the human-swarm interaction and investigate how having access to high-quality data can affect the performance of the human-swarm system - the number of tasks completed and the human trust level in operation. We designed an experiment where a human operator is tasked to operate a swarm to identify casualties in an area within a given time period. One group of operators had the option to request high-quality pictures while the other group had to base their decision on the available low-quality images. We performed a user study with 120 participants and recorded their success rate (directly logged via the simulation platform) as well as their workload and trust level (measured through a questionnaire after completing a human-swarm scenario). The findings from our study indicated that the group granted access to high-quality data exhibited an increased workload and placed greater trust in the swarm, thus confirming our initial hypothesis. However, we also found that the number of accurately identified casualties did not significantly vary between the two groups, suggesting that data quality had no impact on the successful completion of tasks., Comment: Paper accepted for presentation at the IEEE RO-MAN 2023 Conference and would be published as part of the conference proceedings. 8 pages. 5 figures. 3 tables

Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot swarms to real-world applications. Human operators can define goals for the swarm, monitor their performance and interfere with, or overrule, the decisions and behaviour. We present the ``Human And Robot Interactive Swarm'' simulator (HARIS) that allows multi-user interaction with a robot swarm and facilitates qualitative and quantitative user studies through simulation of robot swarms completing tasks, from package delivery to search and rescue, with varying levels of human control. In this demonstration, we showcase the simulator by using it to study the performance gain offered by maintaining a ``human-in-the-loop'' over a fully autonomous system as an example. This is illustrated in the context of search and rescue, with an autonomous allocation of resources to those in need., Comment: 3 Pages, 2 Figures, Accepted to AAMAS 2023 Demo tack

Understanding agent behaviour in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is an important problem in domains such as autonomous driving, disaster response, and sports analytics. Existing MAS problems typically use uniform timesteps with observations for all agents. In this work, we analyse the problem of agent location imputation, specifically posed in environments with non-uniform timesteps and limited agent observability (~95% missing values). Our approach uses Long Short-Term Memory and Graph Neural Network components to learn temporal and inter-agent patterns to predict the location of all agents at every timestep. We apply this to the domain of football (soccer) by imputing the location of all players in a game from sparse event data (e.g., shots and passes). Our model estimates player locations to within ~6.9m; a ~62% reduction in error from the best performing baseline. This approach facilitates downstream analysis tasks such as player physical metrics, player coverage, and team pitch control. Existing solutions to these tasks often require optical tracking data, which is expensive to obtain and only available to elite clubs. By imputing player locations from easy to obtain event data, we increase the accessibility of downstream tasks., Comment: 11 Pages (8 main, 1 references, 2 appendix), 8 figures (7 main, 1 appendix). Accepted at AAMAS 2023 Main Track

The Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group at the University of Southampton has a long track record of research in multiagent systems (MAS). We have made substantial scientific contributions across learning in MAS, game-theoretic techniques for coordinating agent systems, and formal methods for representation and reasoning. We highlight key results achieved by the group and elaborate on recent work and open research challenges in developing trustworthy autonomous systems and deploying human-centred AI systems that aim to support societal good., Comment: Appears in the Special Issue on Multi-Agent Systems Research in the United Kingdom

One of the main tasks for autonomous robot swarms is to collectively decide on the best available option. Achieving that requires a high quality communication between the agents that may not be always available in a real world environment. In this paper we introduce the communication-constrained collective decision-making problem where some areas of the environment limit the agents' ability to communicate, either by reducing success rate or blocking the communication channels. We propose a decentralised algorithm for mapping environmental features for robot swarms as well as improving collective decision making in communication-limited environments without prior knowledge of the communication landscape. Our results show that making a collective aware of the communication environment can improve the speed of convergence in the presence of communication limitations, at least 3 times faster, without sacrificing accuracy., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, accepted to the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022)

In the domain of unmanned vehicles, autonomous robotic swarms promise to deliver increased efficiency and collective autonomy. How these swarms will operate in the future, and what communication requirements and operational boundaries will arise are yet to be sufficiently defined. A workshop was conducted with 11 professional unmanned-vehicle operators and designers with the objective of identifying use-cases for developing and testing robotic swarms. Three scenarios were defined by experts and were then compiled to produce a single use case outlining the scenario, objectives, agents, communication requirements and stages of operation when collaborating with highly autonomous swarms. Our compiled use case is intended for researchers, designers, and manufacturers alike to test and tailor their design pipeline to accommodate for some of the key issues in human-swarm ininteraction. Examples of application include informing simulation development, forming the basis of further design workshops, and identifying trust issues that may arise between human operators and the swarm., Comment: Accepted at AAAI 2022 Spring Symposium Series (Putting AI in the Critical Loop: Assured Trust and Autonomy in Human-Machine Teams)

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, contributed positively to enhancing the autonomous systems industry, along with introducing social, technical, legal and ethical challenges to make them trustworthy. Although Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) is an established and growing research direction that has been discussed in multiple disciplines, e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Law, and Psychology. The impact of TAS on education curricula and required skills for future TAS engineers has rarely been discussed in the literature. This study brings together the collective insights from a number of TAS leading experts to highlight significant challenges for curriculum design and potential TAS required skills posed by the rapid emergence of TAS. Our analysis is of interest not only to the TAS education community but also to other researchers, as it offers ways to guide future research toward operationalising TAS education.

The Coalition Formation with Spatial and Temporal constraints Problem (CFSTP) is a multi-agent task allocation problem in which few agents have to perform many tasks, each with its deadline and workload. To maximize the number of completed tasks, the agents need to cooperate by forming, disbanding and reforming coalitions. The original mathematical programming formulation of the CFSTP is difficult to implement, since it is lengthy and based on the problematic Big-M method. In this paper, we propose a compact and easy-to-implement formulation. Moreover, we design D-CTS, a distributed version of the state-of-the-art CFSTP algorithm. Using public London Fire Brigade records, we create a dataset with $347588$ tasks and a test framework that simulates the mobilization of firefighters in dynamic environments. In problems with up to $150$ agents and $3000$ tasks, compared to DSA-SDP, a state-of-the-art distributed algorithm, D-CTS completes $3.79\% \pm [42.22\%, 1.96\%]$ more tasks, and is one order of magnitude more efficient in terms of communication overhead and time complexity. D-CTS sets the first large-scale, dynamic and distributed CFSTP benchmark., Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, accepted at EUMAS 2021

In task allocation for real-time domains, such as disaster response, a limited number of agents is deployed across a large area to carry out numerous tasks, each with its prerequisites, profit, time window and workload. To maximize profits while minimizing time penalties, agents need to cooperate by forming, disbanding and reforming coalitions. In this paper, we name this problem Multi-Agent Routing and Scheduling through Coalition formation (MARSC) and show that it generalizes the important Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows. We propose a binary integer program and an anytime and scalable heuristic to solve it. Using public London Fire Brigade records, we create a dataset with 347588 tasks and a test framework that simulates the mobilization of firefighters. In problems with up to 150 agents and 3000 tasks, our heuristic finds solutions up to 3.25 times better than the Earliest Deadline First approach commonly used in real-time systems. Our results constitute the first large-scale benchmark for the MARSC problem., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, presented at OptLearnMAS-21. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2106.00379

In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a season and track how these evolve as games unfold to give a fluent objective that can aid in decision-making games. We develop Markov chain Monte Carlo and deep learning-based algorithms that make use of the fluent objectives in order to learn from prior games and other games in the environment and increase the teams' long-term performance. Simulations of our approach using real-world datasets from 760 matches shows that by using optimised tactics with our fluent objective and prior games, we can on average increase teams mean expected finishing distribution in the league by up to 35.6%., Comment: Pre-Print - Accepted for publication at AAMAS-21

In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we give a baseline for the prediction accuracy that can be achieved exploiting both statistical match data and contextual articles from human sports journalists. Our dataset is focuses on a representative time-period over 6 seasons of the English Premier League, and includes newspaper match previews from The Guardian. The models presented in this paper achieve an accuracy of 63.18% showing a 6.9% boost on the traditional statistical methods., Comment: Pre-print. Accepted at: The Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). 5 pages

The Coalition Formation with Spatial and Temporal constraints Problem (CFSTP) is a multi-agent task scheduling problem where the tasks are spatially distributed, with deadlines and workloads, and the number of agents is typically much smaller than the number of tasks, thus the agents have to form coalitions in order to maximise the number of completed tasks. The current state-of-the-art CFSTP solver, the Coalition Formation with Look-Ahead (CFLA) algorithm, has two main limitations. First, its time complexity is exponential with the number of agents. Second, as we show, its look-ahead technique is not effective in real-world scenarios, such as open multi-agent systems, where new tasks can appear at any time. In this work, we study its design and define an extension, called Coalition Formation with Improved Look-Ahead (CFLA2), which achieves better performance. Since we cannot eliminate the limitations of CFLA in CFLA2, we also develop a novel algorithm to solve the CFSTP, the first to be anytime, efficient and with provable guarantees, called Cluster-based Coalition Formation (CCF). We empirically show that, in settings where the look-ahead technique is highly effective, CCF completes up to 30% (resp. 10%) more tasks than CFLA (resp. CFLA2) while being up to four orders of magnitude faster. Our results affirm CCF as the new state-of-the-art algorithm to solve the CFSTP., Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure

In this paper we present a novel approach to optimise tactical and strategic decision making in football (soccer). We model the game of football as a multi-stage game which is made up from a Bayesian game to model the pre-match decisions and a stochastic game to model the in-match state transitions and decisions. Using this formulation, we propose a method to predict the probability of game outcomes and the payoffs of team actions. Building upon this, we develop algorithms to optimise team formation and in-game tactics with different objectives. Empirical evaluation of our approach on real-world datasets from 760 matches shows that by using optimised tactics from our Bayesian and stochastic games, we can increase a team chances of winning by up to 16.1\% and 3.4\% respectively., Comment: AAMAS 2020 Pre-Print Version

Coalition formation typically involves the coming together of multiple, heterogeneous, agents to achieve both their individual and collective goals. In this paper, we focus on a special case of coalition formation known as Graph-Constrained Coalition Formation (GCCF) whereby a network connecting the agents constrains the formation of coalitions. We focus on this type of problem given that in many real-world applications, agents may be connected by a communication network or only trust certain peers in their social network. We propose a novel representation of this problem based on the concept of edge contraction, which allows us to model the search space induced by the GCCF problem as a rooted tree. Then, we propose an anytime solution algorithm (CFSS), which is particularly efficient when applied to a general class of characteristic functions called $m+a$ functions. Moreover, we show how CFSS can be efficiently parallelised to solve GCCF using a non-redundant partition of the search space. We benchmark CFSS on both synthetic and realistic scenarios, using a real-world dataset consisting of the energy consumption of a large number of households in the UK. Our results show that, in the best case, the serial version of CFSS is 4 orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art, while the parallel version is 9.44 times faster than the serial version on a 12-core machine. Moreover, CFSS is the first approach to provide anytime approximate solutions with quality guarantees for very large systems of agents (i.e., with more than 2700 agents)., Comment: Accepted for publication, cite as "in press"

We study a general task allocation problem, involving multiple agents that collaboratively accomplish tasks and where agents may fail to successfully complete the tasks assigned to them (known as execution uncertainty). The goal is to choose an allocation that maximises social welfare while taking their execution uncertainty into account. We show that this can be achieved by using the post-execution verification (PEV)-based mechanism if and only if agents' valuations satisfy a multilinearity condition. We then consider a more complex setting where an agent's execution uncertainty is not completely predictable by the agent alone but aggregated from all agents' private opinions (known as trust). We show that PEV-based mechanism with trust is still truthfully implementable if and only if the trust aggregation is multilinear.

We consider a ridesharing problem where there is uncertainty about the completion of trips from both drivers and riders. Specifically, we study ridesharing mechanisms that aim to incentivize commuters to reveal their valuation for trips and their probability of undertaking their trips. Due to the interdependence created by the uncertainty on commuters' valuations, we show that the Groves mechanisms are not ex-post truthful even if there is only one commuter whose valuation depends on the other commuters' uncertainty of undertaking their trips. To circumvent this impossibility, we propose an ex-post truthful mechanism, the best incentive we can design without sacrificing social welfare in this setting. Our mechanism pays a commuter if she undertakes her trip, otherwise she is penalized for not undertaking her trip. Furthermore, we identify a sufficient and necessary condition under which our mechanism is ex-post truthful., Comment: 13 pages