This book draws inspiration from natural shepherding, whereby a farmer utilizes sheepdogs to herd sheep, to inspire a scalable and inherently human friendly approach to swarm control. The book discusses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) approaches needed to design smart robotic shepherding agents capable of controlling biological swarms or robotic swarms of unmanned vehicles. These smart shepherding agents are described with the techniques applicable to the control of Unmanned X Vehicles (UxVs) including air (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs), ground (unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs), underwater (unmanned underwater vehicles or UUVs), and on the surface of water (unmanned surface vehicles or USVs). This book proposes how smart ‘shepherds’ could be designed and used to guide a swarm of UxVs to achieve a goal while ameliorating typical communication bandwidth issues that arise in the control of multi agent systems. The book covers a wide range of topics ranging from the design of deep reinforcement learning models for shepherding a swarm, transparency in swarm guidance, and ontology-guided learning, to the design of smart swarm guidance methods for shepherding with UGVs and UAVs. The book extends the discussion to human-swarm teaming by looking into the real-time analysis of human data during human-swarm interaction, the concept of trust for human-swarm teaming, and the design of activity recognition systems for shepherding. Presents a comprehensive look at human-swarm teaming; Tackles artificial intelligence techniques for swarm guidance; Provides artificial intelligence techniques for real-time human performance analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, VAMR 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2022 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The VAMR 2023 proceedings were organized in the following topical sections: Designing VAMR Applications and Environments; Visualization, Image Rendering and 3D in VAMR; Multimodal Interaction in VAMR; Robots and Avatars in Virtual and Augmented Reality; VAMR in Medicine and Health; VAMR in Aviation; and User Experience in VAMR.

The two-volume set LNAI 14453 and 14454 constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2023, held in Doha, Qatar, during December 4–7, 2023. The 68 revised full papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. They deal with topics around the interaction between humans and intelligent robots and on the integration of robots into the fabric of society. This year the special topic is "Human-Robot Collaboration: Sea; Air; Land; Space and Cyberspace”, focusing on all physical and cyber-physical domains where humans and robots collaborate.