Yumiko Muto

Timing control of utterance and gesture in interaction between human and humanoid robot

Towards establishing future-oriented relations between humans and robots, not only verbal, but also nonverbal robot functions have been studied. However, it is not clear how these different functions should be combined and implemented in robots in order to achieve ‘natural’ human-robot communication or interaction. In this paper, we focus on the timing for the coordination between utterance as a verbal function and body motion as a nonverbal function. To begin with, we investigated the temporal order and correlation between utterance and gesture in an interpersonal (human-human) interaction scenario as a preliminary experiment (Experiment 1). Then, we controlled the robots response timing based on findings of the first experiment and evaluated the effectiveness of the robots timing control in human-robot interaction (Experiment 2). It was shown that elderly participants significantly preferred the controlled robots response. In addition, the timing of utterance and gestures affected the impression of the robot and interpretation of the verbal message. These results are important findings for designing socially interactive robots for the aging society.

Hierarchical timing structure of utterance in human dialogue

In this research, to clarify the relation between a cognitive process and a timing structure of utterance, the dialogue that consisted of an instruction and a response utterance was analyzed. The results showed that correlation between duration of instruction utterance and that of switching pause was negative and low value, when a change of utterance speed was too small to be aware. However, the correlation between them was positive and high value, when a change of utterance speed was explicitly big. The positive correlation between durations has been reported in some researches, however the negative and low correlation between them have not been reported. These results suggest that there is hierarchical timing structure in human dialog.

Analysis of Eye Hand Interaction in Drawing Figure and Letter

We investigated the eye hand interaction by focusing on the position of fixation, in order to clarify the role of eye in drawing. In the experiment, participants were asked to draw the simple circle and popular Chinese letters under the three different conditions; drawing by using the pen which is out of ink, tracing and drawing. The result showed that three modes of eye-hand behaviour were observed. We suggested that these three modes should be considered to develop the training device to realize more effective handwrite-training.

Temporal relationship between pause and utterance durations in speech of short sentence

In this paper we focused on a pause in speech, and analyzed the factors affecting pause duration. It has been considered that utterance duration just before the pause is the only factor affecting pause duration (preboundary effect), recently effect of utterance duration just after the pause has also been noticed (postboundary effect). However, the relation between two utterance durations and pause duration sandwiched by the durations (pre-post boundary effect) has not been analyzed. Therefore we analyzed these factors inclusively, by using a simple sentence (XY sentence) consisting of two words in speech experiment. Then we used two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for analyzing the contribution of factors, which were the utterance duration of these words. As a result, we found two factors affecting a pause. One is utterance duration just before the pause which was already observed, and the other is the ratio of prior and posterior utterance duration. These results suggest that not only a pre or postboundary effect but also a pre-postboundary effect exist in speech.

Posture Analysis and Evaluation for Modeling in Elderly Adults

In this study, from the viewpoints of enhancing communication of elderly people, we suggest a model to estimate the distortion value of the human body caused by aging as a new index of aging, which is “distortion age,” measured using the robotic “DOCTOR’S EYE”, which is equipped with Kinect. As a result, we found a more significant difference of the distortion in the front–back direction of elderly participants between standing and walking than in the distortion of young participants. We also determined the necessity of measuring the difference for a precise evaluation of the distortion and the effectiveness of the easy measurement method of distortion during walking, such as Kinect. In addition, as the results of the analysis of the relationship between the aging and the distortion, we found the two kinds of positive correlations between age of the elderly participants and the horizontal distance between the positions of the head and shoulder, and between age and the value of differences between the horizontal distances of standing and walking. Finally, based on these two correlations, we proposed the model to estimate the distortion age of elderly people for engineering applications, such as installment of the DOCTOR’S EYE.