User-Defined Co-Speech Gesture Design with Swarm Robots

Non-verbal signals, including co-speech gestures, play a vital role in human communication by conveying nuanced meanings beyond verbal discourse. While researchers have explored co-speech gestures in human-like conversational agents, limited attention has been given to non-humanoid alternatives. In this paper, we propose using swarm robotic systems as conversational agents and introduce a foundational set of swarm-based co-speech gestures, elicited from non-technical users and validated through an online study. This work outlines the key software and hardware requirements to advance research in co-speech gesture generation with swarm robots, contributing to the future development of social robotics and conversational agents.