Natural deictic communication with humanoid robots

A simple view of deictic communication only includes the indication process and recognition process: a person points at an object and says something about it such as “look at this,” and then the other person recognizes the pointing gesture and pays attention to the indicated object. However, this simple view lacks three important processes: attention synchronization, context focus, and believability establishment. We refer to these three processes as “facilitation processes” and implement them in a humanoid robot with a motion capturing system. An experiment with 30 subjects revealed that the facilitation processes make deictic communication natural.