Humanoid Robot handling Hand-Signs Recognition

Abstract

Recent advancements in human-robot interaction have led to tremendous improvement for humanoid robots but still lacks social acceptance among people. Though verbal communication is the primary means of human-robot interaction, non-verbal communication that is proven to be an integral part of the human interactions is not widely used in humanoid robots. This thesis aims to achieve human-robot interaction via non-verbal communication, especially using hand-signs. It presents a prototype system that simulates hand-signs recognition in the NAO humanoid robot, and further an online questionnaire is used to examine people's opinion on the use of non-verbal communication to interact with a humanoid robot. The positive results derived from the study indicates people's willingness to use non-verbal communication as a means to communicate with humanoid robots, thus encouraging robot designers to use non-verbal communications for enhancing human-robot interaction.