PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The article on body movements in robotics describes why body movements are a relevant object of interest for research on robots and categorizes different types of movement based on their functional purpose and intent. Following an overview of robot appearances and application areas, a focus is placed on robotic platforms that are recognized as “social robots” and which may come in anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, caricatured, or functional designs. Body movements are discussed with respect to locomotion, manipulative movement, and expressive movement, with an emphasis on movements that express communicative functions, such as gesture and facial expression. With respect to motion generation, off-line methods employing hardcoded action sequences or pre-recorded motions are contrasted with on-line methods which may be based on imitation learning or which transfer multimodal motion scheduling from virtual humanoid agents to humanoid robots. In particular, research challenges with regard to motor control for arbitrary, expressive hand-arm movement and its coordination with other interaction modalities are discussed.