Evaluating the Potential of Drone Swarms in Nonverbal HRI Communication

TL;DR

This study investigates how drone swarms can serve as nonverbal communication tools, demonstrating that humans can interpret drone behaviors as conveying intent and information, with potential applications in various public and safety contexts.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence that humans perceive drone swarm behaviors as communicative, highlighting the potential of drones for nonverbal interaction and information conveyance.

Findings

Humans interpret drone swarm motions as conveying intent.

Participants perceive drone behaviors as nonthreatening and communicative.

Drone swarms can be effective in emergency and public guidance scenarios.

Abstract

Human-to-human communications are enriched with affects and emotions, conveyed, and perceived through both verbal and nonverbal communication. It is our thesis that drone swarms can be used to communicate information enriched with effects via nonverbal channels: guiding, generally interacting with, or warning a human audience via their pattern of motions or behavior. And furthermore that this approach has unique advantages such as flexibility and mobility over other forms of user interface. In this paper, we present a user study to understand how human participants perceived and interpreted swarm behaviors of micro-drone Crazyflie quadcopters flying three different flight formations to bridge the psychological gap between front-end technologies (drones) and the human observers' emotional perceptions. We ask the question whether a human observer would in fact consider a swarm of drones in their immediate vicinity to be nonthreatening enough to be a vehicle for communication, and whether a human would intuit some communication from the swarm behavior, despite the lack of verbal or written language. Our results show that there is statistically significant support for the thesis that a human participant is open to interpreting the motion of drones as having intent and to potentially interpret their motion as communication. This supports the potential use of drone swarms as a communication resource, emergency guidance situations, policing of public events, tour guidance, etc.