Communication using manual (hand) gestures is considered a defining property of social robots, and their physical embodiment and presence, therefore, we see a need for a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in social robots that use gestures. This systematic literature review aims to address this need by (1) describing the gesture production process of a social robot, including the design and planning steps, and (2) providing a survey of the effects of robot-performed gestures on human-robot interactions in a multitude of domains. We identify patterns and themes from the existing body of literature, resulting in nine outstanding questions for research on robot-performed gestures regarding: developments in sensor technology and AI, structuring the gesture design and evaluation process, the relationship between physical appearance and gestures, the effects of planning on the overall interaction, standardizing measurements of gesture “quality,” individual differences, gesture mirroring, whether human-likeness is desirable, and universal accessibility of robots. We also reflect on current methodological practices in studies of robot-performed gestures and suggest improvements regarding replicability, external validity, measurement instruments used, and connections with other disciplines. These outstanding questions and methodological suggestions can guide future work in this field of research.

Abstract In this paper, we examine the process of designing robot-performed iconic hand gestures in the context of a long-term study into second language tutoring with children of approximately 5 years old. We explore four factors that may relate to their efficacy in supporting second language tutoring: the age of participating children; differences between gestures for various semantic categories, e.g. measurement words, such as small, versus counting words, such as five; the quality (comprehensibility) of the robot’s gestures; and spontaneous reenactment or imitation of the gestures. Age was found to relate to children’s learning outcomes, with older children benefiting more from the robot’s iconic gestures than younger children, particularly for measurement words. We found no conclusive evidence that the quality of the gestures or spontaneous reenactment of said gestures related to learning outcomes. We further propose several improvements to the process of designing and implementing a robot’s iconic gesture repertoire.

This study presents a second language word learning experiment using a social robot with motivational strategies. These strategies were implemented in a social robot tutor to stimulate preschool children's intrinsic motivation. Subsequently, we investigated their effect on children's task engagement and word learning performance. The strategies were derived from the Self-Determination Theory, a well-known psychological theory that assumes that intrinsic motivation is strongly related to the fulfilment of three basic human needs, namely the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We found an increase in the strength and duration of task engagement when all three psychological needs were supported by the robot. However, no significant results for learning gains were observed. Our intervention appears a promising method for improving child-robot interactions in educational settings, especially to sustain in long-term interactions.

To investigate whether a humanoid robot's use of gestures improves children's learning of second language vocabulary, and if variation in gestures strengthens this effect, we conducted a field study where a total of 94 children (aged 4-6 years old) played a language learning game with a NAO robot. The robot either used no gestures at all, repeated the same gesture every time a target word was presented, or produced a different gesture for each occurrence of a target word. We found that, contrary to what the majority of existing research suggests, the robot's use of gestures did not result in increased learning outcomes, compared to a robot that did not use gestures. However, engagement between child and robot was higher in both the repeated and varied gesture conditions, compared to the condition without gestures. An exploratory analysis showed that age played a role: the older children in the study learned more than the younger children when the robot used gestures. It is therefore important to carefully consider the design and application of robot gestures to support the learning process. The contribution of this work is twofold: it is a conceptual reproduction of a previous study, and we have taken first steps towards exploring the role of variation in gestures. The study was preregistered, and all materials are made publicly available.

This video illustrates the large-scale experiment of the L2TOR project that will be presented at the HRI 2019 conference. The experiment aimed to investigate how 192 Dutch 5-year-old children could learn 34 English words from a NAO robot in 7 lessons. The experiment compared 4 conditions: 1) robot using iconic gestures, 2) robot without iconic gestures, 3) tablet only, and 4) a control group. The results revealed that children could learn more English words in all experimental conditions compared to the control group. The three experimental conditions did not show any significant differences regarding the learning outcomes.

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of a robot's iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3) the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot's iconic gestures on learning gains.

This work documents a playful human-robot interaction, in the form of a game of charades, through which a humanoid robot is able to learn how to produce and recognize gestures by interacting with human participants. We describe an extensive dataset of gesture recordings, which can be used for future research into gestures, specifically for human-robot interaction applications.

This paper presents a study in which children, four to six years old, were taught words in a second language by a robot tutor. The goal is to evaluate two ways for a robot to provide scaffolding for students: the use of iconic gestures, combined with adaptively choosing the next learning task based on the child»s past performance. The results show a positive effect on long-term memorization of novel words, and an overall higher level of engagement during the learning activities when gestures are used. The adaptive tutoring strategy reduces the extent to which the level of engagement is diminishing during the later part of the interaction.

Web services technology is a burgeoning technology that has received much attention in the software industry in recent years under the broader umbrella of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The popularity of the service-oriented paradigm is echoed by Microsoft's Bill Gates, where in a memo to Microsoft's top managers and engineers, he states "The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a 'services wave' of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users" [1]. While Web services have been incorporated in many industries in the market place, they are only beginning to appear in the academia, primarily in upper division and graduate CS/IS curricula [2,3]. In this special session, we share our belief that Web services technologies can and should be introduced early in CS/IS curricula. We describe and demo a number of scenarios that illustrate how Web services can be integrated into CS1/IS1 to make these courses more interesting and more importantly, make the students better prepared for upper division classes and for the industry upon graduation. This special session also shares the results of our preliminary findings involving the aforementioned integration and introduces participants to the related courseware. Participants will also receive hands-on experience with some of the scenarios experimented in our study. The intended audience is CS/IS educators who are interested in a novel way of teaching CS1/IS1. NOTE: Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop with wireless access to the Web and with NetBeans.

We present a model of social learning of both language and skills, while assuming—insofar as possible—strict autonomy, virtual embodiment, and situatedness. This model is built by integrating various previous models of language development and social learning, and it is this integration that, under the mentioned assumptions, provides novel challenges. The aim of the article is to investigate what sociocognitive mechanisms agents should have in order to be able to transmit language from one generation to the next so that it can be used as a medium to transmit internalized rules that represent skill knowledge. We have performed experiments where this knowledge solves the familiar poisonous-food problem. Simulations reveal under what conditions, regarding population structure, agents can successfully solve this problem. In addition to issues relating to perspective taking and mutual exclusivity, we show that agents need to coordinate interactions so that they can establish joint attention in order to form a scaffold for language learning, which in turn forms a scaffold for the learning of rule-based skills. Based on these findings, we conclude by hypothesizing that social learning at one level forms a scaffold for the social learning at another, higher level, thus contributing to the accumulation of cultural knowledge.

The subject of the present investigation is population-based adaptive systems (PAS), as implemented in the NEW TIES platform. In many existing PASs two adaptation mechanisms are combined, (non-Lamarckian) evolution and individual learning, inevitably raising the issue of dasiaforgetful populationspsila: individually learned knowledge disappears when the individual that learned it dies. We propose social learning by explicit knowledge transfer to overcome this problem. Our mechanism is based on 1) direct communication among agents in the population, 2) messages carrying rules that the sender agent uses in its controller, and 3) the ability of the recipient agent to incorporate foreign rules into its controller. Thus, knowledge can be disseminated and multiplied within the same generation, making the population a knowledge reservoir for individually acquired knowledge. We present an initial assessment of this idea and show that this social mechanism is capable of efficiently distributing knowledge and improving the performance of the population.

Social learning refers to the process in which agents learn, during their lifetime, new skills by interacting with other agents (for definitions and review of social learning in ethology see Zental...

This study investigates how more advanced joint attentional mechanisms, rather than only shared attention between two agents and an object, can be implemented and how they influence the results of language games played by these agents. We present computer simulations with language games showing that adding constructs that mimic the three stages of joint attention identified in children's early development (checking attention, following attention, and directing attention) substantially increase the performance of agents in these language games. In particular, the rates of improved performance for the individual attentional mechanisms have the same ordering as that of the emergence of these mechanisms in infants’ development. These results suggest that language evolution and joint attentional mechanisms have developed in a co-evolutionary way, and that the evolutionary emergence of the individual attentional mechanisms is ordered just like their developmental emergence.