Multimodal Strategies for Robot-to-Human Communication

Massimo Donini, Cristina Gena, Alessandro Mazzei

Abstract: This paper describes the opportunities of multimodality in the field of robot-to-human communication. In the proposed approach, the coordinated and integrated use of multimedia elements, i.e., text, images, and animations, with the robot's speech plays a very important role in the overall effectiveness of the communicative act. The reference robot used in the research was Pepper, a humanoid robot equipped with a tablet on its front. During the research, various multimodal communication strategies were formalised, implemented and preliminarily evaluated by means of a questionnaire. The results show some statistically significant preferences for specific strategies, marking new avenues of investigation with regard to robot-to-human multimodal communication and its adaptation to the user features.