HERD: Human-AI Collaboration Engaging and Controlling Swarms of Robots and Drones

The HERD project is a four-year research project supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark for the project DIREC - Digital Research Centre Denmark under grant (9142-00001B).
The project will develop technologies that enable end-users to effectively engage and control systems composed of multiple robots. Systems composed of multiple robots will significantly increase the value of industrial products, since current tasks can be done faster and at a lower cost, and entirely new tasks that require multiple coordinated robots can be addressed.

Today, robots and drones take on an increasingly broad set of tasks. However, such robots are limited in their capacity to cooperate with one another and with humans. How can we leverage the potential benefits of having multiple robots working in parallel to reduce time to completion? If robots are given the task collectively as a swarm, they could potentially coordinate their operation on the fly and adapt based on local conditions to achieve optimal or near-optimal task performance.

Together with industrial partners, this project aims to address multi-robot collaboration and design and evaluate technological solutions that enable users to engage and control autonomous multi-robot systems.