A gesture system for social robots

Since social robots will cooperate and assist humans in a variety of daily life situations, interacting with these kind of robots must be easy and intuitive for all kind of users, ranging from children to elderly. Therefore, in the design of social robots, the human must be placed central and thus, social robots need to be equipped with human-like social and communicative skills. Human communication has been an important research field; in particular, the field of facial expressions has been studied intensively. Ekman and Friesen developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a method that decomposes different human facial expressions in the activation of a series of defined Action Units (UA), which are the contraction or relaxation of one or more human muscles. The method is widely used, including in social robotics for the generation of realistic human-like facial expressions to enhance the human-robot interaction. Examples of robots using this method are Eddy, Kismet, Saya, Roman and Probo. Besides facial expressions, also gestures and body language are important non-verbal cues. Gestures and body language have a great influence on the meaning of words and contribute to the general context in which social content can become more meaningful. Therefore, the implementation of gestures and body language in robots also benefits the interaction between humans and robots.