Studying Design Aspects for Social Robots Using a Generic Gesture Method

Since social robots are aimed to interact and communicate with humans in a natural way and operate in our daily environment, their design should be adapted to this. Although many social robots are for that reason more or less based on the human model, the exact morphology of the robot depends on their specific application. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to study the influence of different design aspects, based on a generic gesture method. The gesture method was developed to overcome the difficulties in transferring gestures to different robots, providing a solution for the correspondence problem. A small set of morphological information, inputted by the user, is used to evaluate the generic framework of the software at runtime. Therefore, gestures can be calculated fast and easy for a desired robot configuration. By generating a set of gestures for different morphologies, the importance of specific joints and their influence on a series of postures and gestures can be studied. The gesture method proves its usefulness in the design process of social robots by providing an impression of the necessary amount of complexity needed for a specified task, and can give interesting insights in the required joint angle range. In this paper, this design methodology is illustrated by using the virtual model of the robot Probo.