Designing gestures with semantic meanings for humanoid robot

To facilitate natural Human-Robot Interaction, body language cues are used on various humanoid robots. In this paper, usage of semantic gestures for humanoid robot Nao is discussed. We investigate and compare the application of a few common semantic gestures on both human and humanoid robot. Our experiments show that the interpretations of gestures performed by human and the translated gestures performed by humanoid robot are not the same in some cases. The recognition rates and perceived meanings by humans in the two cases sometimes vary a lot. To enhance fluent and accurate communication between humans and humanoid robots, we suggest to carry out comparative experiments between the two cases. In this way, gestures' application rules for humanoid robot, including the most effective mapping from human's gestures, application occasions and corresponding meanings, can be specifically and clearly defined.