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.

MOSAIX is a new robot swarm platform built to be used in social settings. Consisting of up to 100 individual robot Tiles, MOSAIX is a social swarm system, aimed at helping humans in social tasks such as opinion-mixing and brainstorming. MOSAIX also has the potential to be used as a platform to study human-swarm interaction and swarm expressivity. MOSAIX is intended to be used outside laboratory settings and has already been used to collect 154 opinions about climate change in a local shopping mall, used by participants to create collaborative art and used as an educational tool for schoolchildren. We also discuss future applications, such as MOSAIX acting as smart post-it notes for ideation activities.

Decision-making among groups of humans can benefit from open discussion and inclusion of a diversity of opinions, promoting deliberative democracy. In this work, we test whether a swarm of robots can help facilitate decision-making by visually representing the diversity of opinions. We used a swarm of robots we built, called MOSAIX, that consists of 4-inch touchscreens-on-wheels robots called Tiles. The robots acted as physical avatars for opinions, helping them travel and mix together. We recruited 46 participants split into groups of 7 and 8 to test whether the robot movement had an impact on the decision-making process versus using the robots stationary in the participants' hands akin to smartphones. Furthermore, we wanted to test whether the participants felt comfortable expressing their opinion through the robots. Results show the participants indeed felt comfortable using the robots, and user engagement increased with the movement of the robots. The difference between the participants' first and last opinions also increased with the movement of the robots. We believe that robot swarms have not been used before to facilitate decision-making among a group of people. Therefore, our contribution is in testing the possibility of how and whether using a moving robot swarm helps humans reach a decision.

An immersive theatre experience was designed to raise awareness and question perceptions of 'blindness', through enabling both sighted and blind members to experience a similar reality. A multimodal experience was created, comprising ambient sounds and narratives -- heard through headphones -- and an assortment of themed tactile objects, intended to be felt. In addition, audience members were each provided with a novel haptic device that was designed to enhance their discovery of a pitch-black space. An in the wild study of the cultural experience showed how blind and sighted audience members had different 'felt' experiences, but that neither was a lesser one. Furthermore, the haptic device was found to encourage enactive exploration and provide reassurance of the environment for both sighted and blind people, rather than acting simply as a navigation guide. We discuss the potential of using haptic feedback to create cultural experiences for both blind and sighted people; rethinking current utilitarian framing of it as assistive technology.

Embodied fitness assessment of robotic controllers is slow but grounded, while assessment in a simulated environment is fast but can run foul of the `reality gap'. We present a distributed co-evolutionary method to adapt the environmental model of an on-board simulator within the context of swarm robotics.