Collaboration with an autonomous humanoid robot: A little gesture goes a long way

We report on an experiment in which a human collaborates with a small, autonomous, humanoid robotic toy. The experiment demonstrates that the robot´s use of two simple gestures, namely orienting its head toward the addressee when it speaks and raising its arm in the direction of objects it refers to, significantly improve the human´s perception of the robot´s interaction skills and quality as a collaborator.