Natural and friendly interface is critical for the development of service robots. Gesture-based interface offers a way to enable untrained users to interact with robots more easily and efficiently. Robots are, or soon will be, used in such critical domains as search and rescue, military battle, mine and bomb detection, scientific exploration, law enforcement, and hospital care. Such robots must...

The recognition of affective human communication may be used to provide developers with a rich source of information for creating systems that are capable of interacting well with humans. Posture has been acknowledged as an important modality of affective communication in many fields. Behavioral studies have shown that posture can communicate discrete emotion categories as well as affective dim...

The rapidly growing interest in interactive threedimensional(3D) computer environments highly recommend the hand gesture as one of their interaction modalities. Among several factors constituting a hand gesture, hand movement pattern is spatiotemporally variable and informative, but its automatic recognition is not trivial. In this paper, we describe a hidden Markov(HMM)-based method for recogn...

Two experiments are presented which demonstrate asymmetrical transfer for tactual recognition of individual braille letters in sighted subjects, a task usually associated with right hemisphere specialization. Right-handers were studied in Experiment 1, left- and right-handers in Experiment 2. Poor transfer of training from the right hand to the left hand was observed for right-handed subjects i...

In the context of increasing complexity of mobile applications, by not exploring the hands’ many degrees of freedom the touchscreen interaction can appear as limited. Current computer interfaces have begun to take gestures into consideration more and more to provide a better user experience. Given that most of the interaction we have with our environment is accomplished through our hands, hand ...

In this paper we focus on the concept of low-dimensional posture subspaces for artificial hands. We begin by discussing the applicability of a hand configuration subspace to the problem of automated grasp synthesis our results show that low-dimensional optimization can be instrumental in deriving effective pre-grasp shapes for a number of complex robotic hands. We then show that the computation...

Conveyance and recognition of human emotion and affective expression is influenced by many factors, including culture. Within the user modeling field, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the role affect can play in personalizing interactive interfaces using embodied animated agents. However, little research within the computer science field aims at understanding cultural differen...