ICSR 2015: Social Robotics pp 72-82 | Cite as

Incremental Speech Production for Polite and Natural Personal-Space Intrusion

Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9388)

Abstract

We propose to use a model of personal space to initiate communication while passing a human thereby acknowledging that humans are not just a special kind of obstacle to be avoided but potential interaction partners. As a simple form of interaction, our system communicates an apology while closely passing a human. To this end, we present a software architecture that integrates a social-spaces knowledge base and a component for incremental speech production. Incrementality ensures that the robot’s utterance can be adapted to fit the developing situation in a natural way. Observer ratings show that personal-space intrusion is perceived as both natural and polite if the robot has the capability to utter and adapt an apology in an incremental way whereas it is perceived as unfriendly if the robot intrudes personal space without saying anything. Moreover, the robot is perceived as less natural if it does not adapt.

Keywords

Path Plan Social Space Social Robot Personal Space Simulated Robot 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Natural Language Systems Division Department of InformaticsUniversity of HamburgHamburgGermany
  2. 2.Knowledge and Language Processing Group Department of InformaticsUniversity of HamburgHamburgGermany

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