Swarm Body: Embodied Swarm Robots

Sosuke Ichihashi, So Kuroki, Mai Nishimura, Kazumi Kasaura, Takefumi Hiraki, Kazutoshi Tanaka, and Shigeo Yoshida. 2024. Swarm Body: Embodied Swarm Robots. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11-16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19 pages. doi.org/10.114...
Preprint (arxiv)
arxiv.org/abs/...
Abstract
The human brain’s plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm robots. Swarm robots constitute a collective of robots working in harmony to achieve a common objective, in our case, serving as functional body parts. Embodied swarm robots can dynamically alter their shape, density, and the correspondences between body parts and individual robots. We contribute an investigation of the influence on embodiment of swarm robot-specific factors derived from these characteristics, focusing on a hand. Our paper is the first to examine these factors through virtual reality (VR) and real-world robot studies to provide essential design considerations and applications of embodied swarm robots. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified a system configuration to achieve the embodiment of swarm robots.