  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.
