Person-directed pointing gestures and inter-personal relationship: Expression of politeness to friendliness by android robots

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters 2020-10, Vol.5 (4), p.1-1
• Main Authors: Ishi, Carlos Toshinori, Mikata, Ryusuke, Ishiguro, Hiroshi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: android robots; Androids; friendliness; Humanoid robots; Indexes; inter-personal relationship; motion types; Personal relationships; Pointing gestures; politeness; Robots; Shape; Thumb
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2020.3011354

Pointing gestures directed to a person are usually taken as an impolite manner. However, such person-directed pointing gestures commonly appear in casual dialogue interactions in several different forms. In this study, we first analyzed pointing gestures appearing in human-human dialogue interactions, and observed different trends in the use of different gesture types, according to the inter-personal relationship between the dialogue partners. Then, we conducted multiple subjective experiments by systematically creating behaviors in an android robot, in order to investigate the effects of different types of pointing gestures on the impression of the robot's behaviors. Several factors were taken into account: pointing gesture motion type (hand shape, such as open palm or index finger, hand orientation and motion direction), sentence type (formal or colloquial), gesture speed and gesture hold duration. Evaluation results indicated that the impression of careful/polite or careless/casual is affected by the analyzed factors, and the appropriateness of a behavior depends on the inter-personal relationship to the dialogue partner.