Towards Affective Drone Swarms: A Preliminary Crowd-Sourced Study
This work addresses the problem of humanizing drone swarms for general audiences, though it is incremental as a preliminary study.
The study investigated whether coordinated drone swarm motions can emotionally affect human observers, inspired by dance's emotive impact, and found both promising results and challenges in a preliminary crowd-sourced experiment.
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.