A synchronous model of mental rhythm using paralanguage for communication robots

Abstract

We aimed to achieve smooth human-robot communication by using a communication model based on synchronization between human and robot paralanguages. We also described a robot's mental rhythm that controls its own paralanguage and entrains its mental rhythm into a human paralanguage rhythm for human-robot communication. We built three robots to evaluate our proposed model: the first used our communication model and the other two used extreme models that either completely imitated human paralanguage or did not imitate it at all. We prepared several conversations between subjects and each of the three robots. The experimental results revealed that synchronized conversation using human and robot paralanguages gave humans a positive impression of the robots. This paper also reports the results from analyzing the correlation between human and robot paralanguages. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.