Towards Culture-Aware Co-Speech Gestures for Social Robots

Embedding social robots with the capability of accompanying their sentences with natural gestures may be the key to increasing their acceptability and their usage in real contexts. However, the definition of natural communicative gestures may not be trivial, since it strictly depends on the culture...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of social robotics 2022-08, Vol.14 (6), p.1493-1506
Main Authors: Gjaci, Ariel, Recchiuto, Carmine Tommaso, Sgorbissa, Antonio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Control
Culture
Datasets
Engineering
Humanoid
Integrated approach
Mechatronics
Modules
Robotics
Robots
Speech
Statistical analysis
Verbal communication
Voice communication
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Summary:Embedding social robots with the capability of accompanying their sentences with natural gestures may be the key to increasing their acceptability and their usage in real contexts. However, the definition of natural communicative gestures may not be trivial, since it strictly depends on the culture of the person interacting with the robot. The proposed work investigates the possibility of generating culture-dependent communicative gestures, by proposing an integrated approach based on a custom dataset composed exclusively of persons belonging to the same culture, an adversarial generation module based on speech audio features, a voice conversion module to manage the multi-person dataset, and a 2D-to-3D mapping module for generating three-dimensional gestures. The approach has eventually been implemented and tested with the humanoid robot Pepper. Preliminary results, obtained through a statistical analysis of the evaluations made by human participants identifying themselves as belonging to different cultures, are discussed.
ISSN:1875-4791
1875-4805
DOI:10.1007/s12369-022-00893-y