Modulating the Non-Verbal Social Signals of a Humanoid Robot

In this demonstration we present a repertoire of social signals generated by the humanoid robot Pepper in the context of the EU-funded project MuMMER. The aim of this research is to provide the robot with the expressive capabilities required to interact with people in real-world public spaces such as shopping malls-and being able to control the non-verbal behaviour of such a robot is key to engaging with humans in an effective way. We propose an approach to modulating the non-verbal social signals of the robot based on systematically varying the amplitude and speed of the joint motions and gathering user evaluations of the resulting gestures. We anticipate that the humans' perception of the robot behaviour will be influenced by these modulations

On the simulation of interactive non-verbal behaviour in virtual humans

Development of virtual humans has focused mainly in two broad areas - conversational agents and computer game characters. Computer game characters have traditionally been action-oriented - focused on the game-play - and conversational agents have been focused on sensible/intelligent conversation. While virtual humans have incorporated some form of non-verbal behaviour, this has been quite limited and more importantly not connected or connected very loosely with the behaviour of a real human interacting with the virtual human - due to a lack of sensor data and no system to respond to that data. The interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is highly important in human-human interactions and previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore virtual humans) as real people, and so interactive non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of virtual humans. This paper presents the challenges in creating virtual humans that are non-verbally interactive and drawing corollaries with the development history of control systems in robotics presents some approaches to solving these challenges - specifically using behaviour based systems - and shows how an order of magnitude increase in response time of virtual humans in conversation can be obtained and that the development of rapidly responding non-verbal behaviours can start with just a few behaviours with more behaviours added without difficulty later in development