  This paper explores the expressive capabilities of a swarm of miniature
mobile robots within the context of inter-robot interactions and their mapping
to the so-called fundamental emotions. In particular, we investigate how motion
and shape descriptors that are psychologically associated with different
emotions can be incorporated into different swarm behaviors for the purpose of
artistic expositions. Based on these characterizations from social psychology,
a set of swarm behaviors is created, where each behavior corresponds to a
fundamental emotion. The effectiveness of these behaviors is evaluated in a
survey in which the participants are asked to associate different swarm
behaviors with the fundamental emotions. The results of the survey show that
most of the research participants assigned to each video the emotion intended
to be portrayed by design. These results confirm that abstract descriptors
associated with the different fundamental emotions in social psychology provide
useful motion characterizations that can be effectively transformed into
expressive behaviors for a swarm of simple ground mobile robots.
