Learning to Synchronously Imitate Gestures Using Entrainment Effect

International audienceSynchronisation and coordination are omnipresent and essential in humans interactions. Because of their unavoidable and unintentional aspect, those phenomena could be the consequences of a low level mechanism: a driving force originating from external stimuli called the entrainment effect. In the light of its importance in interaction and wishing to define new HRI, we suggest to model this entrainment to highlight its efficiency for gesture learning during imitative games and for reducing the computational complexity. We will put forward the capacity of adaptation offered by the entrainment effect. Hence, we present in this paper a neural model for gesture learning by imitation using entrainment effect applied to a NAO robot interacting with a human partner

Unintentional entrainment effect in a context of Human Robot Interaction: an experimental study

International audienceModelling nonverbal communication in robotics is a crucial issue to improve Human Robot interactions (HRI). Among several nonverbal behaviours we focus in this article on unintentional rhythmic entrainment and synchronization which has been proven to be highly important in intuitive and natural Human Human communication. Hence, the rising question is whether or no this phenomenon can be reproduced in a context of HRI and what are the prerequisites to ensure its emergence. In this paper, we study rhythmical interactions during imitation games between a NAO robot and naive subjects. We analysed two main types of interactions, a first where NAO performs movements at a fixed rhythm (unidi-rectional) and a second one where the robot is able to adopt the human motion dynamic (bidirectional) using a neural modelling of the entrainment effect based on dynamical systems. We show that using such model allows us to reach synchronization during the interactions and that both partners (robot and human) adapt their frequency as observed in natural HHI. This puts forward the importance of bidirec-tionality for HRI. Moreover, the participants shifted their motion dynamics during the interaction without noticing it, proving the presence of such unintentional rhythmic entrainment in HRI

Synchronisation and desynchronisation as important elements for the development of interaction capabilities

International audience— As non verbal cues are crucial for communication hence long-life learning. Here we focus on the advantages of using rhythmic feedback as implicit marker during interactions. Through two different experimental studies with naive subjects and robots we show the utility of using and modelling rhythmic adaptation but also desynchronisation. We found out that rhythmical adaptation and bidirectional entrain-ment are imperative to reach synchronisation. Yet, we discovered that desynchronisation can be perceived as an implicit marker and hence be used to predict an issue in the interaction, making this interaction more pleasant. This shows that rhythmic cues such as synchronisation and desynchronisation are important elements for the development of interaction capabilities. Index Terms— Synchronisation, Entrainment effect , bidirectional interactions, non verbal communication , interaction capabilities