What Can Actors Teach Robots About Interaction

Abstract

In social interactions, the appropriate timing of physical ac-tions is of vital importance. Otherwise appropriate actions performed at the wrong time can completely alter their per-ceived meaning. In this paper, we propose an approach to de-veloping a physical vocabulary for human-robot interaction that uses trained actors as models of appropriate timing and gestures. We describe out initial work with robots in the per-forming arts, and discuss how this led us to our current ap-proach, and why we believe that it will succeed in improving human-robot interaction.