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International Conference on Social Robotics

ICSR 2022: Social Robotics pp 110–119Cite as

Towards a Framework for Social Robot Co-speech Gesture Generation with Semantic Expression

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13817))

Abstract

The ability to express semantic co-speech gestures in an appropriate manner of the robot is needed for enhancing the interaction between humans and social robots. However, most of the learning-based methods in robot gesture generation are unsatisfactory in expressing the semantic gesture. Many generated gestures are ambiguous, making them difficult to deliver the semantic meanings accurately. In this paper, we proposed a robot gesture generation framework that can effectively improve the semantic gesture expression ability of social robots. In this framework, the semantic words in a sentence are selected and expressed by clear and understandable co-speech gestures with appropriate timing. In order to test the proposed method, we designed an experiment and conducted the user study. The result shows that the performances of the gesture generated by the proposed method are significantly improved compared to the baseline gesture in three evaluation factors: human-likeness, naturalness and easiness to understand.

Supported by ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France and the CSC PhD Scholarship.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Autonomous Systems and Robotics Lab/U2IS, ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France

    Heng Zhang & Adriana Tapus

  2. Cognitive Robotics Laboratory, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Chuang Yu

Authors
  1. Heng Zhang
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  2. Chuang Yu
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  3. Adriana Tapus
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heng Zhang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Filippo Cavallo

  2. Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Laura Fiorini

  4. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Alessandra Sorrentino

  5. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  6. Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

    Xiaorui Liu

  7. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan

    Yoshio Matsumoto

  8. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

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Zhang, H., Yu, C., Tapus, A. (2022). Towards a Framework for Social Robot Co-speech Gesture Generation with Semantic Expression. In: Cavallo, F., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13817. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24667-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24667-8_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-24666-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-24667-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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