Space, Speech, and Gesture in Human-Robot Interaction

To enable natural and productive situated human-robot interaction, a robot must both understand and control proxemics, the social use of space, in order to employ communication mechanisms analogous to those used by humans: social speech and gesture production and recognition. My research focuses on answering these questions: How do social (auditory and visual) and environmental (noisy and occluding) stimuli influence spatially situated communication between humans and robots, and how should a robot dynamically adjust its communication mechanisms to maximize human perceptions of its social signals in the presence of extrinsic and intrinsic sensory interference?