Robot Gesturing

This project focuses upon the production of credible conversational gestures by an anthropomorphic robot, BERTI. An important part of human interaction with a robot is, for the human, that they have a feeling of engagement with an intelligent agent; one way this might be achieved is a robot that uses gestures as well as speech. Gestures are an integral part of human communication, not only for semantic content but also for evidence of speaker thought processes and engagement of the conversational partner. Of particular interest is how the gestures affect a person’s interactions with, and feelings towards, the robot. Obviously there is a panoply of possible gestures, these have been broadly categorised: emblems, beat, metaphoric, regulators, affect displays and iconic. In order to investigate the features of credible robotic gesture we are constraining the gestures implemented to those where errors in appropriateness are least likely to occur; specifically beat gestures and well studied metaphorics.

In order to investigate the above hypotheses participant studies are being conducted where naive users assess the gesture production system. An initial pilot study has been conducted to assess gesture features that are salient to the experimental participants; briefly these were timing, smoothness, natural posture at endpoints and gesture shape (trajectory). These features and other data from the pilot study are being used to inform the design and assessment of future experiments.In the first of the informed experiments we have carried out participants compared the performance of the robot with a video recording of their own performance. The robot performance rated highly in the four metrics despite a significantly poorer rating in similarity with each users performance; this is a promising initial result. Below is a video showing examples of the open handed beat gestures used in the pilot study (classifications taken from Gesture by Adam Kendon).

 

  Click the image to play the video

 

The gestures performed are (in order):
Open hand supine
Open hand: vertical palm
Open hand prone: vertical palm
Open hand prone

* The basic BERTI torso was designed and built by Elumotion Ltd in Partnership with BRL.

PhD Researcher
Paul Bremner

Supervisory Team
Prof. C. Melhuish
Dr. Tony Pipe
Dr. M. Fraser
Dr S. Subramanian

Please click here to download a Video of the robot.

You will need a DivX codec to play this movie.