An open research question has been whether a single human can supervise a true heterogeneous swarm of robots completing tasks in real world environments. A general concern is whether or not the human's workload will be taxed to the breaking point. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's OFFsensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program's field exercises that occurred at U.S. Army urban training sites provided the opportunity to understand the impact of achieving such swarm deployments. The Command and Control of Aggregate Swarm Tactics integrator team's swarm commander users the heterogeneous robot swarm to conduct relevant missions. During the final OFFSET program field exercise, the team collected objective and subjective metrics related to teh swarm commander's human performance. A multi-dimensional workload algorithm that estimates overall workload based on five components of workload was used to analyze the results. While the swarm commander's workload estimate did cross the overload threshold frequently, the swarm commander was able to successfully complete the missions, often under challenging operational conditions. The presented results demonstrate that a single human can deploy a swarm of 100 heterogeneous robots to conduct real-world missions.

翻译：一项悬而未决的研究问题是：单人能否在真实环境中监督真正的异构机器人集群完成任务？核心担忧在于人类工作负荷是否会达到极限。美国国防高级研究计划局"进攻性集群使能战术"项目在美国陆军城市训练基地开展的实地演习，为理解实现此类集群部署的影响提供了契机。作为该项目的集成团队，"聚合集群战术指挥控制"系统的集群指挥官使用异构机器人集群执行相关任务。在OFFSET项目最终实地演习中，团队收集了与集群指挥官人类表现相关的客观与主观指标。基于工作负荷五个维度计算整体负荷的多维工作负荷算法被用于分析结果。尽管集群指挥官的工作负荷估算频繁超过过载阈值，但该指挥官仍能在极具挑战性的作战条件下成功完成任务。实验结果表明，单人即可部署由100台异构机器人组成的集群执行实战任务。