Robot swarms have the potential to help groups of people with social tasks, given their ability to scale to large numbers of robots and users. Developing multi-human-swarm interaction is therefore crucial to support multiple people interacting with the swarm simultaneously - which is an area that is scarcely researched, unlike single-human, single-robot or single-human, multi-robot interaction. Moreover, most robots are still confined to laboratory settings. In this paper, we present our work with MOSAIX, a swarm of robot Tiles, that facilitated ideation at a science museum. 63 robots were used as a swarm of smart sticky notes, collecting input from the public and aggregating it based on themes, providing an evolving visualization tool that engaged visitors and fostered their participation. Our contribution lies in creating a large-scale (63 robots and 294 attendees) public event, with a completely decentralized swarm system in real-life settings. We also discuss learnings we obtained that might help future researchers create multi-human-swarm interaction with the public.

翻译：机器人群体因其能够扩展至大规模机器人与用户数量的能力，在协助人群完成社交任务方面具有潜力。因此，发展多人-群体交互对于支持多人同时与机器人群体互动至关重要——这一领域的研究尚不充分，与单人-单机器人或单人-多机器人交互形成对比。此外，大多数机器人系统仍局限于实验室环境。本文介绍了我们利用MOSAIX（一种由Tile机器人构成的群体）在科学博物馆中促进创意构思的工作。我们使用63个机器人作为智能便签群体，收集公众输入并根据主题进行聚合，提供了一个动态演化的可视化工具，吸引参观者并促进其参与。我们的贡献在于创建了一个大规模（63个机器人与294名参与者）的公共活动，并在真实场景中实现了完全去中心化的群体系统。我们还讨论了所获得的经验，这些经验可能有助于未来研究者创建面向公众的多人-群体交互系统。