Hand-Clapping Games with a Baxter Robot

Robots that work alongside humans might be more effective if they could forge a strong social bond with their human partners. Hand-clapping games and other forms of rhythmic social-physical interaction may foster human-robot teamwork, but the design of such interactions has scarcely been explored. At the HRI 2017 conference, we will showcase several such interactions taken from our recent work with the Rethink Robotics Baxter Research Robot, including tempo-matching, Simon says, and Pat-a-cake-like games. We believe conference attendees will be both entertained and intrigued by this novel demonstration of social-physical HRI.

[1]  Katherine J. Kuchenbecker,et al.  Using IMU data to demonstrate hand-clapping games to a robot , 2016, 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[2]  Katherine J. Kuchenbecker,et al.  Equipping the Baxter robot with human-inspired hand-clapping skills , 2016, 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[3]  Katherine J. Kuchenbecker,et al.  Rhythmic Timing in Playful Human-Robot Social Motor Coordination , 2016, ICSR.