Swarm Body: Embodied Swarm Robots.

The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial bodyparts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitiveinteractions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarmrobots. Swarm robots constitute a collective of robots working in harmony toachieve a common objective, in our case, serving as functional body parts.Embodied swarm robots can dynamically alter their shape, density, and thecorrespondences between body parts and individual robots. We contribute aninvestigation of the influence on embodiment of swarm robot-specific factorsderived from these characteristics, focusing on a hand. Our paper is the firstto examine these factors through virtual reality (VR) and real-world robotstudies to provide essential design considerations and applications of embodiedswarm robots. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified asystem configuration to achieve the embodiment of swarm robots.