Abstract:
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Humanoid robots are already among us and they are beginning to assume more social and personal
roles, like guiding and assisting people. Thus, they should interact in a human-friendly manner, using not
only verbal cues but also synchronized non-verbal and para-verbal cues. However, available robots are not
able to communicate in this multimodal way, being just able to perform predefined gesture sequences, hand-
crafted to accompany specific utterances. In the current paper, we propose a model based on three different
approaches to extend humanoid robots communication behaviour with upper body gestures synchronized
with the speech for novel utterances, exploiting part-of-speech grammatical information, prosody cues, and
a combination of both. User studies confirm that our methods are able to produce natural, appropriate and
good timed gesture sequences synchronized with speech, using both beat and emblematic gestures. |
Abstract:
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The second author has been funded by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), Ministerio de Ciencia,
Innovación y Universidades and the Fondo Social Europeo (FSE) under grant RYC-2015-17239 (AEI/FSE, UE). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers that helped to improve this paper through their valuable comments. |