From manipulation to communicative gesture

— Assisting humans in their daily lives requires robots to be proficient in manual tasks and effective in communicating states/intentions with human users. This paper advocates a learning approach for the development of communicative behavior in robots and favors a uniform means of learning communicative actions and manual skills in the same framework. In fact, this work argues for a critical relationship between the structure of motor skills and the structure required to communicate effectively. We show how to reuse manual behavior for conveying intentions to humans and to do so in the same grounded manner as the robot learns to interact with other objects in the environment. The learning framework and preliminary human-robot interaction experiments are presented, where a humanoid robot incrementally builds and refines communicative actions by discovering the utility of manipulation behavior in the presence of humans. The learning results from 18 subjects provide support for the h...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HRI
• Authors: Shichao Ou, Roderic A. Grupen
• Keywords: Communicative Actions, Communicative Behavior, HRI 2010, Human Computer Interaction, Robot