Development of a Speech-driven Nodding Robot with a Head Back-and-Forth Moving Mechanism

Abstract

The speech-driven embodied interaction robot called InterRobot has been developed for supporting human interaction and communication by generating the coherently related communicative motions to speech input. The InterRobot expresses embodied communicative motions such as nodding, which is very important for reactive motion in human interaction. In this paper, focusing on the nodding response of the robot that gives the speaker a sence of interest or listening, we develop a speech-driven nodding robot with a head back-and-forth moving mechanism, whose various motions make the speaker feel deep empathy.