Planning body gesture of android for multi-person human-robot interaction

Natural body gesture, as well as speech dialog, is crucial for human-robot interaction and human-robot symbiosis. We have already proposed a real-time gesture planning method. In this paper, we afford this method more flexibility by adding motion parameterization function. Especially in multi-person HRI, this function becomes more important because of its adaptation to changes of a speaker's and/or object's locations. We implement our method for multi-person HRI system on the android Actroid-SIT, and conduct two experiments for estimating the precision of gestures and the human impressions about the Actroid. Through these experiments, we confirmed our method gives humans a more sophisticated impressions.