Conversational robot utilizing facial and body expressions

Communication using non-verbal expression, such as gesture, eyeshot, posture and facial expression, plays an important role in human interaction. For examples, in conveying spatial information of the position and/or size of an object, pointing actions also contribute to simplify the verbal expressions. By nodding or changing facial expressions toward the speaker's utterance, human convey their state of mind to the speaker and realize the conversable environment. While, no current conversational systems are equipped with such adequate communicational ability. In this study, we implement the body and facial expressions and conversational function to a humanoid robot and try to realize a natural conversational system. As a result, effective use of the pointing action with verbal expressions `that one' or `this one' contributes to simplify the verbal expression and realize rhythmical conversation, and proper feedback actions to the user with facial expressions improve the transparency of the system and the performance of the interface.