Investigating the Effects of Visual Saliency on Deictic Gesture Production from a Humanoid Robot

In many collocated human-robot interaction scenarios, robots are required to accurately and unambiguously indicate an object or point of interest in the environment. Realistic, cluttered environments containing many visually salient targets can present a challenge. In this paper, we describe an experiment and results detailing the effects of visual saliency and pointing modality on human perceptual accuracy of robot deictic gestures (head and arm pointing) and compare these results to the perception of human pointing.