Spontaneous talking gestures using Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a talking gesture generation system based on Generative Adversarial Networks, along with an evaluation of its adequateness. The talking gesture generation system produces a sequence of joint positions of the robot’s upper body which keeps in step with an uttered sentence. The suitability of the approach is demonstrated with a real robot. Besides, the motion generation method is compared with other (non-deep) generative approaches. A two-step comparison is made. On the one hand, a statistical analysis is performed over movements generated by each approach by means of Principal Coordinate Analysis. On the other hand, the robot motion adequateness is measured by calculating the end effectors’ jerk, path lengths and 3D space coverage.