CaseStudy（Augsburg）.pdfVIP

HUMAN ROBOT INTERACTION Markus H?ring Human Centered Multimedia / Augsburg University Augsburg (Germany) When humans communicate with each other, they do not only use speech to convey the content of a message. At the same time, they employ a large variety of emotional and social signals to express consciously or unconsciously additional information, for example, about their attitude towards the conversational partner, their level of attention and their personality. As robots are expected to interact with humans in social environments, like hospitals, schools or at home, a comfortable and intuitive way of communication has to be established. The ability to display emotions is a key feature in human communication. In recent years huge progress was made in the effort to express emotions with humanoid robots, mainly with facial expressions. For expressions based on Body Movement and other signals, like Sound, no common grounds have been established so far. “ As robots are expected to interact with humans in social environments, like hospitals, schools or at home, a comfortable and intuitive way of communication has to be established. The ability to display emotions is a key feature in human communication. ” Over the past ten years, our lab has been working on the simulation of human-like behaviors in synthetic agents. On the one hand, we employ machine learning methods to analyze social signals, such as emotions, conveyed by humans interacting with synthetic agents. On the other hand, we generate expressive behaviors by synchronizing speech, facial expressions, gaze, gestures and posture. For example, a synthetic agent may talk about a particular object and at the same time gaze and point at it. Physical embodiment via a robot opens up a number of new research challenges to us. Unlike virtual agents, robotic agent co-habit with the human in a physical space in which social interactions take place. The NAO robot enables rapid prototyping of social behaviors, such as emot