Beat gesture generation rules for human-robot interaction

Bremner, P.; Pipe, A. G.; Fraser, M.; Subramanian, S.; Melhuish, C.

Abstract

In order for anthropomorphic robots to communicate with people in a human-like way they need to produce gestures along with speech. Beat gestures are a key category of gestures, accompanying emphasis and timing of talk. The standard approach for autonomously adding gestures to speech for artificial agents to perform, is to identify when gestures should occur, and then select appropriate movements from a prewritten library. However, selecting naively from a library is unlikely to result in particularly human-like gesture sequences. In order to obtain examples of engaging human beat gestures, we studied videos of chat show hosts. Our analysis reveals rules for the creation of human-like beat gestures. We have combined these rules with hand scripted non-beat gestures, to produce a monologue with a complete set of accompanying gestures; it is designed for performance by our humanoid robot BERTI. In order to test the gestures produced we carried out a pilot study at the London Science Museum. The results of the study indicate that having correctly designed gesture sequences improves observer engagement. © 2009 IEEE.

Citation

Bremner, P., Pipe, A. G., Fraser, M., Subramanian, S., & Melhuish, C. (2009). Beat gesture generation rules for human-robot interaction. In Proceedings - IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (1029-1034). https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2009.5326136

• Conference Name: IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
• Conference Location: Toyama, Japan
• Start Date: Sep 27, 2009
• End Date: Oct 2, 2009
• Online Publication Date: Nov 10, 2009
• Publication Date: Nov 10, 2009
• Deposit Date: Jan 25, 2024
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Pages: 1029-1034
• Book Title: Proceedings - IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
• ISBN: 9781424450817
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2009.5326136
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11628114