Design of conversational humanoid robot based on hardware independent gesture generation

TL;DR

This paper presents a hardware-independent gesture generation system for humanoid robots, enabling natural and realistic physical gestures to enhance human-robot conversational interactions, especially for elderly and disabled care.

Contribution

It introduces a novel gesture-generating architecture using labanotation that can be applied across different humanoid robots, improving naturalness in robot communication.

Findings

Gesture generation system compatible with various robots

Enhanced naturalness in robot-human interactions

Applicable to robots with diverse physical characteristics

Abstract

With an increasing need for elderly and disability care, there is an increasing opportunity for intelligent and mobile devices such as robots to provide care and support solutions. In order to naturally assist and interact with humans, a robot must possess effective conversational capabilities. Gestures accompanying spoken sentences are an important factor in human-to-human conversational communication. Humanoid robots must also use gestures if they are to be capable of the rich interactions implied and afforded by their humanlike appearance. However, present systems for gesture generation do not dynamically provide realistic physical gestures that are naturally understood by humans. A method for humanoid robots to generate gestures along with spoken sentences is proposed herein. We emphasize that our gesture-generating architecture can be applied to any type of humanoid robot through the use of labanotation, which is an existing system for notating human dance movements. Labanotation's gesture symbols can computationally transformed to be compatible across a range of robots with doddering physical characteristics. This paper describes a solution as an integrated system for conversational robots whose speech and gestures can supplement each other in human-robot interaction.