Using the soundpainting language to fly a swarm of drones

Abstract

The goal of this position paper is to explore an existing structured gestural language, called Soundpainting, to control and direct a swarm of autonomous drones. Soundpainting already integrates the notion of groups of entities and makes it possible to address one single entity of a set/subset, still being able to address the set as a whole. The key point is that Soundpainting has been designed for directing a set of improvising live performers, and, thus, we link this ability of improvisation to the capacity of decision of the autonomous drones. Indeed, Soundpainting allows a real exchange and an adaptive dialogue between the soundpainter and the group, enabling contextual interpretation by each individual, and generating rich interaction and dialogue. With a systematical analysis of the Soundpainting gestures, we show that it is perfectly adaptable to the context of the flying swarms of drones.