HERD: Human-AI Collaboration
- Engaging and Controlling Swarms of Robots and Drones
The HERD project was 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 successfully developed technologies that enabled end-users to effectively engage with and control systems composed of multiple robots. The research advanced understanding of multi-robot coordination, demonstrating how such systems could perform tasks more efficiently and cost-effectively, while also opening up new possibilities for tasks requiring collaborative robotic operation.
Project period: Jan. 2021 - Sept. 2025
Budget: DKK 17.08 million
Principal investigator/contact: Anders Lyhne Christensen
Budget: DKK 17.08 million
Principal investigator/contact: Anders Lyhne Christensen
Robots and drones, such as AgroIntelli’s autonomous farming robot and Robotto's emergency response drones, expanded their roles within the project. AgroIntelli explored the use of multiple robots working concurrently in farm field operations to improve efficiency, showing how swarm coordination could enable tasks to be dynamically adjusted based on field conditions. Similarly, Robotto investigated the deployment of multiple drones to provide broader, real-time data coverage in emergency situations. The project developed algorithms for drone coordination and single-console swarm management, supporting applications in agriculture, search & rescue, firefighting, inspections, and first responder missions.
Publications
- Christensen, A. L., Grøntved, K. A. R., Hoang, M. T. O., van Berkel, N., Skov, M., Scovill, A., ... & Merritt, T. (2022). The HERD Project: Human-Multi-Robot Interaction in Search & Rescue and in Farming. In Adjunct Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (pp. 1-4)
- Hettich, A. (2023), Reconnecting with Robotics via Digital Platforms: A Case of Agricultural Robotics, The 46th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS2023), Porvoo, Finland
- Hoang, MT.O, van Berkel, N., Skov, M.B., and ., Merritt, T. (2023). Challenges and Requirements in Multi-Drone Interfaces. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA'23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 65, 1–9.
- Hoang, MT.O., Grøntved, K.A.R., van Berkel, N., Skov, M.B., Christensen, A.L., Merritt, T. (2023). Drone Swarms to Support Search and Rescue Operations: Opportunities and Challenges. In: Dunstan, B.J., Koh, J.T.K.V., Turnbull Tillman, D., Brown, S.A. (eds) Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and Their Emergent Cultural Ecologies. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham.
- Grøntved, K. A., Lundquist, U. P., & Christensen, A. L. (2023). Decentralized multi-UAV trajectory task allocation in search and rescue applications. In 2023 21st International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) (pp. 35-41). IEEE
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- Ahlskog, J., Bahodi, M.T., Lugmayr, A., and Merritt, T. (2024). Fostering Trust Through User Interface Design in Multi-Drone Search and Rescue. In Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS ’24), September 16–18, 2024, Austin, TX, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686038.3686052
- Hettich, A. (2024). What Happens to a Robotic Startup While It Evolves. In HHAI 2024: Hybrid Human AI Systems for the Social Good: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence. HHAI 2024. (pp. 466-468). IOS Press.
- Grøntved, K. A., Jepsen, J. H., Christensen, A. L., Jensen, K., Lundquist, U. P. S., & Campusano, M. (2024). Towards Autonomous Multi-UAV U-Space Operation Planning. In 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ICUAS 2024 (pp. 929-934). IEEE.
Grøntved, K. A., Bahodi, M. T., & Christensen, A. L. (2024, June). Automated Task Generation for Multi-drone Search and Rescue Operations. In International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (pp. 266-271). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
- Grøntved, K. A., Ladigl, R., & Christensen, A. L. (2025). Communication for UAV Swarms: an Open-source, Low-cost Solution Based on ESP-NOW. In 2025 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) (pp. 489-495). IEEE.
- Grøntved, K. A. R., Jarabo-Peñas, A., Reid, S., Rolland, E. G. A., Watson, M., Richards, A., Bullock, S., & Christensen, A. L. (2025). SAREnv: An Open-Source Dataset and Benchmark Tool for Informed Wilderness Search and Rescue Using UAVs. Drones, 9(9), 628. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones9090628
Media coverage and events
"Nyt forskningsprojekt skal udvikle droner og landbrugsrobotter i marken", AgriWatch, Feb. 2022
"Robotflokke i marken", Aktuel Videnskab, March 2022
"Drone swarms must respond fast in case of natural disasters and drowning accidents", DIREC, Oct. 2022
"Sværme af robotter og droner skal i flok løse deres mission", Ingenøren, April 2023
"Swarms of robots will assist farmers and rescue workers", SDU press release, Jan. 2022
