Robotic Emotional Gestures (Prosody)

When someone complains “it’s not what you said, its how you said it.” They can be refering to one of two things: your word choice or your use of prosody. Prosody refers to your audible presentation of words to convey a specific tone or emotion. For example, raising the pitch at the end of a phrase implies that its a quesion.

We created emotional musical phrases (Refer to Richard Savery’s PhD thesis on how he lead this awesome project). to convey specific emotions. In addition, we wanted the robots to have specific gestures to match such emotions.

This was also the first project I worked on at GTCMT, we wanted to create emotonal gestures for non humanoid robots that would accompany our emotional musical prosody. To do this, we looked at how humans use gestures in their postures (similar to Eckmans Facial Action Coding System) and created our own framework for designing gestures for non humanoid robots. This involved some degree of freedom reduction and mapping human morphology to robot arm morphology (yes, this foreshadowing some of my MOCAP dance work).

We ended up using this framework/ gestures to express different personalities with robots, create emotional contagion, and change a users perceived entitativity with a group of robots.

Relevant Publications

Emotion musical prosody for robotic groups and entitativity
Richard Savery, Amit Rogel, Gil Weinberg
2021 RoMan Conference

Robotic Dancing, Emotional Gestures and Prosody: A Framework for Gestures of Three Robotic Platforms
Amit Rogel, Richard Savery, Gil Weinberg
Sound and Robotics Book Chapter

How Happy Should I be? Leveraging Neuroticism and Extraversion for Music-Driven Emotional Interaction in Robotics
Richard Savery, Amit Rogel, Lisa Zahray, Gil Weinberg
Sound and Robotics Book Chapter

Augmenting a Group of Task-Driven Robotic Arms with Emotional Musical Prosody
Richard Savery, Amit Rogel, Gil Weinberg
Sound and Robotics Book Chapter