The Swarm Garden: Human-Swarm Interaction for Self-Adaptive Art and Architecture

Abstract

As part of the Self-Organizing Swarms and Robotics Lab’s project in collaboration with the Form Finding Lab titled, The Swarm Garden, this thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of human-swarm interactions to create “living-like” architectures that invoke nature to make people feel a sense of health and well-being. At the intersection of swarm intelligence, architectural design, art-making, and dance, The Swarm Garden seeks to demonstrate an experimental, nature-inspired interactive architecture exhibit where flower modules bloom in response to human presence and can exhibit complex long-range and real-time responses through self-organization. Through the investigation of proximity and vision based interaction modalities for resource constrained devices, applications of expressive and embodied swarms, and development of a robust, canvas-like human-swarm system, we explore the potential and realization of architectural swarms in human spaces. The project culminates in a public exhibit titled, The Swarm Garden: An Interactive Architecture Exhibition, held at the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts CoLab, where multiple visitors constantly create new outcomes through interaction and stochasticity so that each visit is a new experience. This work contributes to the ongoing research of the applications of swarm intelligence to art, architecture, and human expression. Ultimately, research in this area can pave the way for the design of human spaces that lead to better health outcomes, human-robot interaction that improves our quality of life and well-being, and beautiful experiences in art and art-making through emergent interaction outcomes. The Swarm Garden also serves as a proof of concept of the combination of swarm intelligence and buckling sheet technology from the Form Finding Lab that will be the launchpad for larger scale, self-adaptive facade architecture applications.