Human Perception of Swarm Robot Motion

Abstract

As robots become ubiquitous in our everyday environment, we start seeing them used in groups, rather than individually, to complete tasks. We present a study aimed to understand how different movement patterns impact humans' perceptions of groups of small tabletop robots. To understand this, we focus on the effects of changing the robots' speed, smoothness, and synchronization, on perceived valence, arousal, and dominance. We find that speed had the strongest correlation to these factors. With regard to human emotional response to the robots, we align with and build on prior work dealing with individual robots that correlates speed to valence and smoothness to arousal. In addition, participants noted an increase in positive affect in response to synchronized motion, though synchronization had no significant impact on measured perception. Based on our quantitative and qualitative results, we describe design implications for swarm robot motion.