Automatic Generation of Conversational Robot Gestures for Human-friendly Steward Robot

Recently, in service robotics area, increasing attention is being paid on interaction capability of robot for human-being as well as its task performing capability. In this paper, in particular, an automatic gesture generation methodology for conversational interaction of service robots is presented toward more human-friendly human-robot interaction. From the survey on the results in the psychology field, we first categorized the target gestures into the three types of gestures, which are basic, supplementary/emphasizing, and finishing/interconnective gestures with their corresponding unit gesture components. Then, a set of mapping rules have been extracted for gesture generation based on observing human behavioral patterns during conversation, by means of morpheme decomposition and analysis. From the given text input in Korean, the proposed system tries to generate robotic gestures, which consist of the head and the arm motions, by gesture selection and motion scheduling schemes. Finally, we discuss on the effectiveness of the proposed system with the simulated motions of robot as an initial attempt to apply in a practical system.