Human-Recognizable Robotic Gestures

Abstract

For robots to be accommodated in human spaces and in humans daily activities, robots should be able to understand messages from the human conversation partner. In the same light, humans must also understand the messages that are being communicated by robots, including the non-verbal ones. We conducted a web-based video study wherein participants gave interpretations on the iconic gestures and emblems that were produced by an anthropomorphic robot. Out of the 15 gestures presented, we found 6 robotic gestures that can be accurately recognized by the human observer. These were nodding, clapping, hugging, expressing anger, walking, and flying. We reviewed these gestures for their meaning from literatures in human and animal behavior. We conclude by discussing the possible implications of these gestures for the design of social robots that are aimed to have engaging interactions with humans.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

Using robot animation to promote gestural skills in children with autism spectrum disorders

“…Eight of them were iconic gestures (or pantomimic enactments), and the rest were markers (Table ). The findings of a study by Cabibihan, So, and Pramanik () showed that these gestures are well recognized by speakers in Chinese society. We used the Choreographe software program (Aldebaran Robotics, Paris, France) to create video clips, each featuring a robot animation producing a gesture (Figure ; the animated clips can be viewed using the link: http://bit.ly/20gestures).…”

Combining Robotic Persuasive Strategies: The Persuasive Power of a Storytelling Robot that Uses Gazing and Gestures

“…For example, a robot's pointing gestures can improve a human observer's comprehension of spatial information and have been found to be useful for an observer to identify objects [40,41]. In [42], it was shown that gestures of nodding, clapping, hugging, expressing anger, walking, and flying can be understood by a human observer if these are performed by a robot or a human. In general, speech-related gestures can influence the evaluation and judgments about the speaker more positively as compared to gestures that are not speech-related or speech without gestures [5,25].…”

Efficiency of speech and iconic gesture integration for robotic and human communicators - a direct comparison

“…This observation clearly differs from earlier findings by Cabibihan el al. [18] and Zheng et al [19] for whom the robotic gestures were difficult to identify on their own. It is hard to determine if the differences between studies are due to subtleties in gestures captured by the tele-operation scheme, the types of gestures used, or the different method of response-gathering (forced choice used here as opposed to open responses in previous work), or some combination of all of these.…”

“…Results were variable and seemed to depend on the type of gestures used. For example, participants were reported to be able to identify co-operative robot gestures in timed response trials, even when performed with non-humanlike velocity profiles [17], but not iconic, emotive and emblematic gestures [18][19] [20]. As gestures in the above studies were handscripted and presented in isolation (without speech), it cannot be excluded that instead of robotic gestures themselves being difficult to comprehend, it was the way they were scripted (and the inherent difficulties in scripting) that was the actual problem.…”