A Model of Embodied Communications with Gestures between Human and Robots

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a model of embodied communications focusing on body movements.Moreover, we explore the validity of the model through psychological experiments on human-human and human-robot communications involving giving/receiving route directions.The proposed model emphasizes that, in order to achieve smooth communications, it is important for a relationship to emerge from a mutually entrained gesture and for a joint viewpoint to be obtained by this relationship.The experiments investigated the correlations between body movements and utterance understanding in order to confirm the importance of the two points described above.We use robots so that we can control parameters in experiments and discuss the issues related to the interaction between humans and artifacts.Results supported the validity of the proposed model: in the case of human-human communications, subjects could communicate smoothly when the relationship emerged from the mutually entrained gesture and the joint viewpoint was obtained; in the case of human-robot communications, subjects could understand the robot's utterances under the same conditions but not when the robot's gestures were restricted.