To provide effective and enjoyable human-robot interaction, it is important for social robots to exhibit nonverbal behaviors, such as a handshake or a hug.

However, the traditional approach of reproducing pre-coded motions allows users to easily predict the reaction of the robot, giving the impression that the robot is a machine rather than a real agent. Therefore, we propose a neural network architecture based on the Seq2Seq model that learns social behaviors from human-human interactions in an end-to-end manner.

We adopted a generative adversarial network to prevent invalid pose sequences from occurring when generating long-term behavior. To verify the proposed method, experiments were performed using the humanoid robot Pepper in a simulated environment. Because it is difficult to determine success or failure in social behavior generation, we propose new metrics to calculate the difference between the generated behavior and the ground-truth behavior.

We used these metrics to show how different network architectural choices affect the performance of behavior generation, and we compared the performance of learning multiple behaviors and that of learning a single behavior. We expect that our proposed method can be used not only with home service robots, but also for guide robots, delivery robots, educational robots, and virtual robots, enabling the users to enjoy and effectively interact with the robots.

Original Article: Nonverbal Social Behavior Generation for Social Robots Using End-to-End Learning