Cyber-Shepherd: A Smartphone-based Game for Human and Autonomous Swarm Control

Abstract

Human and Autonomous control of a swarm of robots is a non-trivial task compounded by the multi-agent nature of a swarm and the tight-coupling in swarm dynamics. Our previous work has been successful in designing controllers to shepherd a swarm of sheep by learning from human demonstrations. However, humans could get disengaged easily if the platform to collect demonstrations is uninteresting. In this paper, we propose a smartphone based Shepherding game as a platform to collect data on the behaviour of Shepherding models. The game is designed to allow both humans and artificial intelligence (AI) empowered shepherds to control the swarm of sheep. The game offers a plug-and-play ability for different human and AI controllers of the shepherd. The game logs all movements made by the human during controlling the shepherd for use by supervised learning algorithms to develop autonomous controllers. We present and evaluate different components of the game.