# From Motions to Emotions: Can the Fundamental Emotions be Expressed in a Robot Swarm?

## TL;DR

This study demonstrates that a swarm of simple robots can express fundamental human emotions through motion and shape behaviors inspired by social psychology, with participants correctly identifying the intended emotions.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach to robot swarm expressiveness by mapping social psychology-based emotion descriptors to swarm behaviors, validated through participant surveys.

## Key findings

- Most participants correctly identified the intended emotions from swarm behaviors.
- Psychologically inspired motion descriptors effectively convey emotions in robot swarms.
- Swarm behaviors can be designed to express fundamental emotions reliably.

## Abstract

This paper explores the expressive capabilities of a swarm of miniature mobile robots within the context of inter-robot interactions and their mapping to the so-called fundamental emotions. In particular, we investigate how motion and shape descriptors that are psychologically associated with different emotions can be incorporated into different swarm behaviors for the purpose of artistic expositions. Based on these characterizations from social psychology, a set of swarm behaviors is created, where each behavior corresponds to a fundamental emotion. The effectiveness of these behaviors is evaluated in a survey in which the participants are asked to associate different swarm behaviors with the fundamental emotions. The results of the survey show that most of the research participants assigned to each video the emotion intended to be portrayed by design. These results confirm that abstract descriptors associated with the different fundamental emotions in social psychology provide useful motion characterizations that can be effectively transformed into expressive behaviors for a swarm of simple ground mobile robots.