Evaluating the Potential of Drone Swarms in Nonverbal HRI Communication

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.

Towards Affective Drone Swarms: A Preliminary Crowd-Sourced Study

Drone swarms are teams of autonomous un-manned aerial vehicles that act as a collective entity. We are interested in humanizing drone swarms, equipping them with the ability to emotionally affect human users through their non-verbal motions. Inspired by recent findings in how observers are emotionally touched by watching dance moves, we investigate the questions of whether and how coordinated drone swarms' motions can achieve emotive impacts on general audience. Our preliminary study on Amazon Mechanical Turk led to a number of interesting findings, including both promising results and challenges.