Interactive Communication Between Human and Robot Using Nonverbal Cues

Socially interactive robots need the same behaviors and capabilities of people to interact naturally with humans. One of these capabilities is the perception of nonverbal cues. The paper presents a biologically inspired perception system for a social robot. This system is based on the psychological theory of perceptual cycle. It is composed of two main parts: schema and exploration. The schema represents the bottom-up information processing, whereas the exploration represents the top-down information processing. The system has been implemented and evaluated on a humanoid robot. The experiments have shown promising results. Several interaction sessions were conducted with the robot. The robot was able to perceive the nonverbal cues of the interaction partner and behave accordingly.