Minimal set of recognizable gestures for a 10 DOF anthropomorphic robot

Abstract

Gestures play an important role in the communication of social robots. This paper presents an approach to simplify the upper body of the robot, proposing a method resulting in a smaller and cost-effective way of building robots which can perform gestures that are recognizable to humans. A reduced robot model of 10 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) is investigated and the human gestures are mapped directly onto the robots. Results from our user study show that the decrease in DOF does not critically affect human-like gesture motions to significantly affect the perceptions by the human observer. Specifically, some gestures have shown that participants make no mistake in interpreting the robot gestures, suggesting the possibility of its implementation on pre-programmed motion on robotic toys. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.