Gesture Generation from Trimodal Context for Humanoid Robots

Abstract

Natural co-speech gestures are essential components to improve the experience of Human-robot interaction (HRI). However, current gesture generation approaches have many limitations of not being natural, not aligning with the speech and content, or the lack of diverse speaker styles. Therefore, this work aims to repoduce the work by [5] generating natural gestures in simulation based on tri-modal inputs and apply this to a robot. During evaluation, “motion variance” and “Frechet Gesture Distance (FGD)” is employed to evaluate the performance objectively. Then, human participants were recruited to subjectively evaluate the gestures. Results show that the movements in that paper have been successfully transferred to the robot and the gestures have diverse styles and are correlated with the speech. Moreover, there is a significant likeability and style difference between different gestures.