Deliberative Democracy with Robot Swarms

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.