Expressing Robot Personality through Talking Body Language

Abstract

Social robots must master the nuances of human communication as a mean to convey an effective message and generate trust. It is well-known that non-verbal cues are very important in human interactions, and therefore a social robot should produce a body language coherent with its discourse. In this work, we report on a system that endows a humanoid robot with the ability to adapt its body language according to the sentiment of its speech. A combination of talking beat gestures with emotional cues such as eye lightings, body posture of voice intonation and volume permits a rich variety of behaviors. The developed approach is not purely reactive, and it easily allows to assign a kind of personality to the robot. We present several videos with the robot in two different scenarios, and showing discrete and histrionic personalities.