Motion Design for Nonverbal Communication with a Humanoid Robot

In the near future, humanoid robots will act as the partners of human beings in daily life. Among numerous human-like competencies, motion of humanoid robots is critical for providing humans with richer interactions with such robots. Motion plays an essential role in complementing spoken communication. Moreover, the motions of humanoid robots generate nonverbal communication in various contexts. Through this nonverbal communication, humans can interact with robots not only directly but also indirectly or even unconsciously, as if the robot were simply part of the environment. Before the developments of humanoid robots, embodied conversational agents (ECAs) were introduced as virtual embodied representations of humans that communicated multi-modally with humans and there has been a great deal of research on ECA behavior. ECAs and humanoid robots share many features in terms of how they communicate with humans. Nevertheless, simply adapting knowledge gathered from current ECA studies to a humanoid robot study is insufficient for the following reasons: 1. ECA studies lack knowledge focused on nonverbal communication, which has become more important in the physical world; 2. ECA studies have focused on developing agent-centered intelligence rather than a usercentered experience; 3. ECA studies have developed logics to generate motions automatically rather than to provide designers with the practical knowledge necessary to design desirable motions. Motivated by these three arguments, we seek to pioneer a new field of motion design between robot engineering and design discipline. To bring this motion study into design discipline, we focused on human-centered experience through nonverbal communication with a humanoid robot. This paper aims to outline sharable user experience in order to help designer create desirable motions for humanoid robots in various speechless contexts.