Towards Affective Drone Swarms: A Preliminary Crowd-Sourced Study

TL;DR

This paper explores how coordinated drone swarms can be designed to evoke emotional responses in humans by leveraging non-verbal motions, aiming to humanize autonomous aerial vehicle teams.

Contribution

It introduces a preliminary crowd-sourced study investigating the potential for drone swarms to achieve emotive impacts through coordinated movements.

Findings

Drone motions can evoke emotional responses in viewers.

There are promising signs of emotional impact from drone choreography.

Challenges remain in reliably inducing specific emotions.

Abstract

Drone swarms are teams of autonomous un-manned aerial vehicles that act as a collective entity. We are interested in humanizing drone swarms, equipping them with the ability to emotionally affect human users through their non-verbal motions. Inspired by recent findings in how observers are emotionally touched by watching dance moves, we investigate the questions of whether and how coordinated drone swarms' motions can achieve emotive impacts on general audience. Our preliminary study on Amazon Mechanical Turk led to a number of interesting findings, including both promising results and challenges.