UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

          "Conceptual Motorics - Generation and Evaluation
                of Communicative Robot Gesture"

                        Dr. Maha Salem

    (Adaptive Systems Research Group, School of Computer Science,
                    University of Hertfordshire)

                        25 June 2013  (*Tuesday*)
                           1 pm -2 pm

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                       Lecture Theatre LC108

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

How do humans perceive communicative gesture behavior in robots? Although
gesture is a crucial feature of social interaction, this research question
is still largely unexplored in the field of social robotics. The work
presented in this talk thus sets out to investigate how robot gesture can
be used to design and realize more natural and human-like communication
capabilities for social robots. The adopted approach is twofold.

Firstly, the technical challenges encountered when implementing a
speech-gesture generation model on a robotic platform are addressed. The
realized framework enables a humanoid robot to produce finely synchronized
speech and co-verbal hand and arm gestures. In contrast to many existing
systems, these gestures are not limited to a predefined repertoire of
motor actions but are flexibly generated at run-time.

Secondly, the achieved expressiveness is exploited in controlled
experiments to gain a deeper understanding of how robot gesture might
impact human experience and evaluation of human-robot interaction. The
findings contribute new insights into human perception of communicative
robot gesture and ultimately support the presented approach of endowing
social robots with such non-verbal behaviors.


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk