Perceptions of Quantitative and Affective Meaning from Humanoid Robot Hand Gestures

People use their hands in a variety of ways to communicate information along with speech during face-to-face conversation. Humanoid robots designed to converse with people need to be able to use their hands in similar ways, both to increase the naturalness of the interaction and to communicate additional information in the same way people do. However, there are few studies of the particular meanings that people derive from robot hand gestures, particularly for more abstract gestures such as so-called metaphoric gestures that may be used to communicate quantitative or affective information. We conducted an exhaustive study of the 51 hand gestures built into a commercial humanoid robot to determine the quantitative and affective meaning that people derive from observing them without accompanying speech. We find that hypotheses relating gesture envelope parameters (e.g., height, distance from body) to metaphorically corresponding quantitative and affective concepts are largely supported.