BERTI Learns To Gesture, Plays Rock Paper Scissors
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 23 of February , 2009 at 8:08 am
The Bristol Robotics Lab’s BERTI robot is designed to explore the use of gestures in human communication. People normally gesture unconsciously when they talk, and BRL is trying to get a robot to emulate these gestures to help people feel more comfortable when interacting with androids.
Obviously there is a panoply of possible gestures, these have been broadly categorised: emblems, beat, metaphoric, regulators, affect displays and iconic. In order to investigate the features of credible robotic gesture we are constraining the gestures implemented to those where errors in appropriateness are least likely to occur; specifically beat gestures and well studied metaphorics.
So basically, the researchers are trying to determine what sort of gestures are most likely to accompany specific types of speech, and then enable BERTI to use those gestures when it says something appropriate. At the moment, they’re focusing on hand gestures, but it would be cool if the idea of “gesture” expands to include body language like head movements.
BERTI was most recently spotted at the London Science Museum, where it was playing rock paper scissors with humans outfitted with gesture detecting gloves:
I don’t know about you, but I was totally waiting for BERTI’s right hand to shoot out and grab his opponent by the neck after losing one of those times, how’s that for a gesture that subtly says “you’d better stop winning or I’ll snap your scrawny human neck.” Maybe that’s version 2.0.
[ BRL ] VIA [ Robots.net ]
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