Human perception of swarm fragmentation

In the context of robot swarms, fragmentation refers to a breakdown in communication and coordination among the robots. This fragmentation can lead to issues in the swarm self-organisation, especially the loss of efficiency or an inability to perform their tasks. Human operators influencing the swarm could prevent fragmentation. To help them in this task, it is necessary to study the ability of humans to perceive and anticipate fragmentation. This article studies the perception of different types of fragmentation occurring in swarms depending on their behaviour selected amongst swarming, flocking, expansion and densification. Thus, we characterise human perception thanks to two metrics based on the distance separating fragmented groups and the separation speed. The experimentation protocol consists of a binary discrimination task in which participants have to assess the presence of fragmentation. The results show that detecting fragmentation for expansion behaviour and anticipating fragmentation, in general, are challenging. Moreover, they show that humans rely on separation distance and speed to infer the presence or absence of fragmentation. Our study paves the way for new research that will provide information to humans to better anticipate and efficiently prevent the occurrence of swarm fragmentation.