Conceptual Motorics (CoR-Lab; Honda Research Europe) (Completed)

Enabled the humanoid robot ASIMO to produce synthetic speech along with expressive hand gesture, e.g., to point to objects or to illustrate actions currently discussed, without being limited to a predefined repertoire of motor actions. A series of experiments gave new insights into human perception of gestural machine behaviors and how to use these in designing artificial communicators. We found that humans attend to a robot’s gestures, are affected by incongruent speech-gesture combinations, and socially prefer robots that occasionally produce imperfect gesturing.