Gesture mimicry in social human-robot interaction

Abstract

Mimicry of social behaviours is an imitation behaviour among humans that benefits building rapport, teamwork and aids blending into social situations. As social robots become more popular, these are aspects that gain importance in robotic behaviour designs. A key part of human communication to which mimicry might be applied is co-verbal gesture, which we have investigated. In our proposed system dynamic cues are extracted from human gestures and adapted to a robot's gesture motion. We have conducted empirical studies to validate this mimicry approach. Our results support that the concept of imitating gesture features is a successful method for robotic gesture mimicry, which can be helpful to support human-robot cooperation and building rapport.