Express Yourself: Enabling large-scale public events involving multi-human-swarm interaction for social applications with MOSAIX

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a large-scale, real-world multi-human-swarm interaction using 63 robots at a public event, showcasing scalable social applications and providing insights for future research in decentralized swarm systems.

Contribution

It introduces MOSAIX, a decentralized multi-human-swarm interaction system deployed in a public setting with 63 robots and 294 participants, advancing practical social swarm applications.

Findings

Successful large-scale public engagement with swarm robots.

Insights into decentralized swarm system operation in real-life environments.

Potential for scalable social applications using robot swarms.

Abstract

Robot swarms have the potential to help groups of people with social tasks, given their ability to scale to large numbers of robots and users. Developing multi-human-swarm interaction is therefore crucial to support multiple people interacting with the swarm simultaneously - which is an area that is scarcely researched, unlike single-human, single-robot or single-human, multi-robot interaction. Moreover, most robots are still confined to laboratory settings. In this paper, we present our work with MOSAIX, a swarm of robot Tiles, that facilitated ideation at a science museum. 63 robots were used as a swarm of smart sticky notes, collecting input from the public and aggregating it based on themes, providing an evolving visualization tool that engaged visitors and fostered their participation. Our contribution lies in creating a large-scale (63 robots and 294 attendees) public event, with a completely decentralized swarm system in real-life settings. We also discuss learnings we obtained that might help future researchers create multi-human-swarm interaction with the public.