Conceptual Motorics - Generation and Analysis of Meaningful Arm Movements for Robot Gesture
Project Leaders: Stefan Kopp, Ipke Wachsmuth, Katharina Rohlfing, Frank Joublin
PhD Student: Maha Salem
One of the crucial steps in the attempt to build sociable, communicative humanoid robots is to endow them with expressive nonverbal behaviors. One such behavior is hand gesture, with which human speakers frequently emphasize, supplement, or even complement what they express in speech, and to which human listeners have been shown to be well attentive. Humanoid robot companions that are envisioned to engage in natural and fluent human-robot interaction in rich environmental settings must thus, too, be able to produce speech-accompanying hand movements that derive from conceptual to-be-communicated information, e.g., to point to external objects referred to or to illustrate the action currently discussed. This poses a number of research challenges, especially with regard to a motor control for arbitrary, expressive hand-arm movement and its coordination with others interaction modalities.
