Exploring the interplay of swarm robotics and choreography to nourish expressivity and construction of meaning for humans

Duval, Hélène, Rochette, Audrey, Dussault, Geneviève and St-Onge, David. 2025. « Exploring the interplay of swarm robotics and choreography to nourish expressivity and construction of meaning for humans ». In Robot Theater. Routledge.
(In press)

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Abstract

Large groups of beings, acting coherently together are subject to human fascination for centuries. These groups, when self-organized in nature, are referred to as swarms. When observing a flock of birds or a swarm of ants, we, as humans, wonder what their motivation is, or we get lost in the contemplation of their complex organization and the aesthetic qualities of their coordinated motion. In a scenic setting, this human fascination and contemplation can also manifest itself in front of a group of dancers improvising a dance. Nowadays, a branch of robotic engineering is translating the findings from decades of biological swarm observation into artificial robotic swarm’s algorithms. Despite the functional and social potential of technological work in robotic swarms, it remains opaque to non-experts. To demystify and enrich this technological work, our team have leveraged interdisciplinary collaborative work bridging choreography, movement analysis and robotics to make groups of robots move in a decentralized way through emergent behaviors. Knowledge derived from dance and expressive motion design can inform our understanding of the legibility and the meaning we construct from robotic swarms. By framing domain-specific ontologies for robotic swarms and group choreography, we found several similarities and connections. We postulate that the collaboration between engineering and dance can benefit from a shared ontology, thus we introduce one based on swarm robotics and group choreography. This paper introduces such a shared ontology and showcase its usability to explore expressivity and construction of meaning.

Item Type:	Book chapter
Researcher:	Researcher St-Onge, David
Affiliation:	Génie mécanique
Date Deposited:	18 Mar 2025 14:07
Last Modified:	27 Mar 2025 19:39
URI:	https://espace2.etsmtl.ca/id/eprint/30626

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