A human-centered approach to robot gesture based communication within collaborative working processes

Abstract

Abstract-The increasing ability of industrial robots to perform complex tasks in collaboration with humans requires more capable ways of communication and interaction. Traditional systems use separate interfaces such as touchscreens or control panels in order to operate the robot, or to communicate its state and prospective actions to the user. Transferring human communication, such as gestures to technical non-humanoid robots, creates various opportunities for more intuitive humanrobot-interaction. Interaction shall no longer require a separate interface such as a control panel. Instead, it should take place directly between human and robot. To explore intuitive interaction, we identified gestures that are relevant for co-working tasks from human observations. Based on a decomposition approach we transferred them to robotic systems of increasing abstraction and experimentally evaluated how well these gestures are recognized by humans. We created a humanrobot interaction use-case in order to perform the task of handling dangerous liquid. Results indicate that several gestures are well perceived when displayed with context information regarding the task.

Cooperative gestures for industry: Exploring the efficacy of robot hand configurations in expression of instructional gestures for human–robot interaction

“…For the boldRemove gesture, a HOH pose was commonly misinterpreted as “rotating the part”, and the OH pose was commonly misinterpreted again as “pressing on the part/button”. Collectively, these results add support to and elaborate upon related work on differences in human anthropomorphic vs. robot non-anthropomorphic nonverbal communication (Ende et al, 2011; Gleeson et al, 2013).…”

“…Similarly, the OH pose also often corresponded to the best and most confidently recognized robot hand pose. Comparing the approach of this work with that of Haddadi et al (2013), these results suggest that articulated fingers are not necessary for Directional gestures , adding support to the work by Ende et al (2011) that states that referential gestures can be well-recognized by non-anthropomorphic robotic hands. Furthermore, it appears that fingers might not be needed at all, as there was often no statistically significant difference between OH and CH poses—a closed hand was just as effective as an open hand at communicating directionality.…”

“…Just as how nonverbal communication can replace speech in environments in which verbal communication is unreliable or undesirable, nonverbal communication is expected to take a similar role in human–robot interaction. Various human-like nonverbal cues—hand gestures in particular—have been explored as communication mechanisms between humans and robots during turn-taking (Breazeal et al, 2005; Chao et al, 2011), playing games (Short et al, 2010), hesitation (Moon et al, 2013, 2011), and hand gestures within collaborative working processes (Ende et al, 2011; Gleeson et al, 2013; Haddadi et al, 2013; Riek et al, 2010; Sauppé and Mutlu, 2014).…”

“…Few studies have focused on the effectiveness of nonverbal communication of non-anthropomorphic robotic manipulators in industrial settings (Ende et al, 2011; Gleeson et al, 2013; Haddadi et al, 2013; Moon et al, 2013, 2011). In one such study, Moon et al (2011) studied the efficacy of robot hesitation gestures as a means to convey robot planner uncertainty in a human–robot resource conflict that arises when both the robot and the person reach for the same object at the same time; results of their study showed that human observers can easily recognize the hesitation gestures expressed by a robotic manipulator.…”

“…Their results discuss design implications for the use of gestures in different settings and show that these settings can benefit from the use of particular types of gestures. Ende et al (2011) explored which human-like nonverbal gestures are communicative for robotic systems of different levels of anthropomorphism. They found that referencing gestures, conveying “this one” and “from here to there”, and terminating gestures, conveying “stop” or “no”, are well recognized on all types of robots.…”