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

TL;DR

This paper presents work with MOSAIX, a swarm of robot Tiles, that facilitated ideation at a science museum that created a large-scale public event, with a completely decentralized swarm system in real-life settings.

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.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Left: Virtual keyboard shown to participants to enter their idea. Middle: Aggregates formed by robots from participants' ideas. Right: samples of ideas shown. The small button on the left of the screen allows participants to go back to the virtual keyboard and re-enter ideas.
• Figure 2: Last aggregates formed at the end of day 1, day 2 and day 3, respectively. Top: Robotic aggregates. Bottom: Traditional aggregates.
• Figure 3: Boxplot figures showing the answers to question 1 of the questionnaire given to 50 participants. The dots represent the participants’ answers, the red line ending with crosses is the median of the participants’ answers, and the white diamond is the mean of the answer.
• Figure 4: Boxplot figures showing the answers to question 2 of the questionnaire given to 50 participants.
• Figure 5: Barchart figures showing the answers to question 3 of the questionnaire given to 50 participants. Note that the total number of response for robotic and traditional combined (n=46) is less than 50. This is because participants were free to skip questions they did not want to answer.