Applied Sciences (May 2021)

Expressing Robot Personality through Talking Body Language

  • Unai Zabala,
  • Igor Rodriguez,
  • José María Martínez-Otzeta,
  • Elena Lazkano

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app11104639
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 10
p. 4639

Abstract

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Social robots must master the nuances of human communication as a mean to convey an effective message and generate trust. It is well-known that non-verbal cues are very important in human interactions, and therefore a social robot should produce a body language coherent with its discourse. In this work, we report on a system that endows a humanoid robot with the ability to adapt its body language according to the sentiment of its speech. A combination of talking beat gestures with emotional cues such as eye lightings, body posture of voice intonation and volume permits a rich variety of behaviors. The developed approach is not purely reactive, and it easily allows to assign a kind of personality to the robot. We present several videos with the robot in two different scenarios, and showing discrete and histrionic personalities.

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