Robotic Body Language

When humans communicate its with more than just the words we speak. There is the tone, the pitch and then of course al those body movements made subtly that comprise of body language. This is one of the reasons that speaking with robots, who may answer the questions accurately, doesn’t always seem natural. Now researchers are giving robots a class in body language which will make it easier for us to understand them.

A recent science study published in Frontiers in Psychology speaks of making robots move their hands like humans do. Apparently it helps humans understand the robots better when they do these iconic hand actions. Iconic gestures have a distinct meaning, like opening a door or a book, and using gestures together with speech is known as “multi-modal communication.”

In essence of you have a common hand signal that both humans and robots know means a specific thing, it makes communicating with the robotic avatars that much easier. The project was conducted by having an actor read a specific script using normal hand movements and then a computer generated avatar did the same using the iconic gestures programmed. The people who saw both felt that the gestures contributed to a better understanding of what the speaker said.