Design expressive behaviors for robotic puppet

Abstract

This paper describes the generation of expressive gestures on a robotic puppet controlled using behavior-based method. Recent findings on biological motion mechanisms provide an inspiring model for controlling high dimensional robot with motor primitives. The modular features of primitives make them the building blocks for constructing complex behaviors. The inborn similarity between gesture and speech enable us to study behavior with those methods for language. We designed a motor controller using a small set of primitives. The effectiveness of this method is validated on the robotic puppet with different expressive gestures generated by superimposing and sequencing the primitives.