Abstract
Social robots must master the nuances of human communication as a mean to convey an effective message and generate trust. It is well-known that non-verbal cues are very important in human interactions, and therefore a social robot should produce a body language coherent with its discourse. In this work, we report on a system that endows a humanoid robot with the ability to adapt its body language according to the sentiment of its speech. A combination of talking beat gestures with emotional cues such as eye lightings, body posture of voice intonation and volume permits a rich variety of behaviors. The developed approach is not purely reactive, and it easily allows to assign a kind of personality to the robot. We present several videos with the robot in two different scenarios, and showing discrete and histrionic personalities.
Highlights
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is the study dedicated to understand, design and evaluate robotics systems to be used by or with humans [1,2]
HRI is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from multiple fields such as human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language understanding, or social sciences among others
Social robots have emerged as a class of robots that require a highly evolved type of human robot interaction
Summary
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is the study dedicated to understand, design and evaluate robotics systems to be used by or with humans [1,2]. HRI is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from multiple fields such as human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language understanding, or social sciences among others. Social robots have emerged as a class of robots that require a highly evolved type of human robot interaction. These robots cannot be merely teleoperated and must posses skills that are beyond those present in cooperative robots, due to the challenges faced when developing social intelligence; robots that interact with humans should behave as we humans do. Interacting robots must have abilities such as communicating using verbal (natural language) or non-verbal modalities (lights, movements or sound); expressing affection or perceiving human emotions; possessing distinctive personality; modelling human social aspects; learning; establishing social relationships [3,4]. Robots able to interact in such manners are being sketched in many applications such as caregivers of the elderly or of people with physical or emotional disabilities, in education, entertainment, and even in domestic scenarios [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
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