Behavioural Styles

I have been developing a model of the so called behavioral styles. These styles act like a filter over communicative gestures to transpose a way of performing an action. We used multiple platforms (Nao – humanoid, and Reeti – facial expression) to test this rendering on facial and bodily communication [14]. We showed that these styles were perceptible and could influence the attitude of the child interacting with the robot[15, 16]. More recently, we showed that idle movements (movements that have no communicative intention) when displayed by a humanoid robot increases the anthropomorphic perception of the robot by the user [17]. These findings help in designing more natural interaction with humanoid robots, making them more acceptable and socially intelligent. Research Perspectives: We will be continuing research in this area working within the ANIMATAS EU project (starting in January 2018) on synchrony and how alignment can keep learners engaged in a collaborative task with a robot.