  This paper proposes an intuitive human-swarm interaction framework inspired
by our childhood memory in which we interacted with living ants by changing
their positions and environments as if we were omnipotent relative to the ants.
In virtual reality, analogously, we can be a super-powered virtual giant who
can supervise a swarm of mobile robots in a vast and remote environment by
flying over or resizing the world and coordinate them by picking and placing a
robot or creating virtual walls. This work implements this idea by using
Virtual Reality along with Leap Motion, which is then validated by
proof-of-concept experiments using real and virtual mobile robots in mixed
reality. We conduct a usability analysis to quantify the effectiveness of the
overall system as well as the individual interfaces proposed in this work. The
results revealed that the proposed method is intuitive and feasible for
interaction with swarm robots, but may require appropriate training for the new
end-user interface device.
