Project Info

Confidence-Based Category Transition of Spatial Gestures

Tom Williams | twilliams@mines.edu

Situated human-human communication typically involves a combination of both natural language and gesture, especially deictic gestures intended to draw the listener’s attention to target referents. To engage in natural communication, robots must thus be similarly enabled not only to generate natural language, but to generate the appropriate gestures to accompany that language. In this project, students will examine the gestures humans use to accompany spatial language, specifically the way that these gestures continuously degrade in specificity and then discretely transition into non-deictic gestural forms along with decreasing confidence in referent location. Students will further use collected data to design more human-like gestures for language-capable robots.

For more information:
https://mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications/stogsdill2020hrinlg/

Grand Challenge: Reverse-engineer the brain