Online speech-driven head motion generating system and evaluation on a tele-operated robot

Abstract

We developed a tele-operated robot system where the head motions of the robot are controlled by combining those of the operator with the ones which are automatically generated from the operator's voice. The head motion generation is based on dialogue act functions which are estimated from linguistic and prosodic information extracted from the speech signal. The proposed system was evaluated through an experiment where participants interact with a tele-operated robot. Subjective scores indicated the effectiveness of the proposed head motion generation system, even under limitations in the dialogue act estimation.