Gesture encoding and reproduction for human‐robot interaction in text‐to‐gesture systems

The purpose of this paper is to deal with a method for gesture encoding and reproduction, particularly aiming at a text‐to‐gesture (TTG) system that enables robotic agents to generate proper gestures automatically and naturally in human‐robot interaction.

Reproducing proper gestures, naturally synchronized with speech, is important under the TTG concept. The authors first introduce a gesture model that is effective to abstract and describe a variety of human gestures. Based on the model, a gesture encoding/decoding scheme is proposed to encode observed gestures symbolically and parametrically and to reproduce robot gestures from the codes. In particular, this paper mainly addresses a gesture scheduling method that deals with the alignment and refinement of gestural motions, in order to reproduce robotic gesticulation in a human‐like, natural fashion.

The proposed method has been evaluated through a series of questionnaire surveys, and it was found that reproduced gestures by a robotic agent could appeal satisfactorily to human beings.

This paper provides a series of algorithms to treat overlapped motions and to refine the timing parameters for the motions, so that robotic agents reproduce human‐like, natural gestures.