Timing control effects of utterance to communicative actions on embodied interaction with a robot

The timing to generate communicative actions and utterance in face-to-face greeting interaction is analyzed by synthesis for applying to an embodied interaction support with a robot. First, the analysis of human greetings clarifies the pause and time delay of utterance to communicative actions. Then, 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. These results demonstrate the importance of timing control in robot-human embodied interaction and the applicability in advanced robot-human communication.