Time lag effects of utterance to communicative actions on robot-human greeting interaction

The timing to generate communicative action and utterance in face-to-face greeting interaction is analyzed by synthesis for applying to a robot-human interaction support. The analysis by synthesis is performed by using an embodied robot system and confirms that the variation of the pause and lags of utterance to communicative actions brings different communicative effects, i.e. about 0.3 sec lag is desirable for familiar greetings, and the longer lag is for polite greetings. This result demonstrates the importance of timing in robot-human embodied interaction and the applicability in advanced human-robot communication.