Collective expression: how robotic swarms convey information with group motion

Abstract

When faced with the need of implementing a decentralized behavior for a group of collaborating robots, strategies inspired from swarm intelligence often avoid considering the human operator, granting the swarm with full autonomy. However, field missions require at least to share the output of the swarm to the operator. Unfortunately, little is known about the users’ perception of group behavior and dynamics, and there is no clear optimal interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based on groups motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We implement a grammar of decentralized control algorithms to explore their expressivity. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to measure how natural, readable, or easily understandable it may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behavior of the swarm. A first user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system. We follow up with a small group of users tasked with the design of expressive motion sequences to convey internal states using our grammar of algorithms. We comment on their design choices and we assess the interpretation performance by a larger group of users. We show that some of the internal states were perceived as designed and discuss the parameters influencing the performance.

MoTiS Parameters for Expressive Multi-Robot Systems: Relative Motion, Timing, and Spacing

“…Ref. [ 56 ] used spatial and temporal synchronicity, and inter-robot distance as control parameters in decentralized swarm algorithms to test perceived expressivity of the swarm. These parameters were used in prior work by [ 57 ] to explore perceived cohesion and expressivity.…”

Mutual Shaping in Swarm Robotics: User Studies in Fire and Rescue, Storage Organization, and Bridge Inspection

“…There is a lack of similar research into swarm robotics. There has been some research into human-swarm interaction (Couture-Beil et al, 2010 ; Nagi et al, 2012 , 2014 ; Pourmehr et al, 2013 ; Kolling et al, 2016 ; Nam et al, 2019 ; St-Onge et al, 2019 ). However, the attitudes, perceptions and desires of workers for swarms has not yet been researched (to our knowledge).…”

Interactive Multi-Robot Painting Through Colored Motion Trails

“…The intersection of robots and arts has become an active object of study as both researchers and artists push the boundaries of the traditional conceptions of different forms of art by making robotic agents dance (Nakazawa et al, 2002 ; LaViers et al, 2014 ; Bi et al, 2018 ), create music (Hoffman and Weinberg, 2010 ), support stage performances (Ackerman, 2014 ), create paintings (Lindemeier et al, 2013 ; Tresset and Leymarie, 2013 ), or become art exhibits by themselves (Dean et al, 2008 ; Dunstan et al, 2016 ; Jochum and Goldberg, 2016 ; Vlachos et al, 2018 ). On a smaller scale, the artistic possibilities of robotic swarms have also been explored in the context of choreographed movements to music (Ackerman, 2014 ; Alonso-Mora et al, 2014 ; Schoellig et al, 2014 ), emotionally expressive motions (Dietz et al, 2017 ; Levillain et al, 2018 ; St.-Onge et al, 2019 ; Santos and Egerstedt, 2020 ), or interactive music generation based on the interactions between agents (Albin et al, 2012 ), among others.…”