Robot Gestures Make Difficult Tasks Easier: The Impact of Gestures on Perceived Workload and Task Performance

      Due to the importance of the gestures as a non-verbal signal in human communication, it has been added to human-computer interaction field.

The research examine the highly influence of the robot gesture and showed by experiment how it can contribute to help the user’ task performance and perceived workload. The HRI direction-giving experiment that this research addressed discovered how the gesture positively helps to recall the information, however, the experiment lead to two assumptions:

1. The first assumption shows that the performance of the participant will be better by using the robot gesture in a difficult task but not with the easy one.

2. Another assumption says that the people perceived workload would be lower with the help of robot gesture whether the task is easy or difficult.

In this experiment, the robot Nao has been used [figure 1]

Figure[1]Gestures of the Nao robot

The experiment is a memory game with number of participants (all of them are students) and the robot Nao. The robot has told a random set of directions to the participants to navigate a building and later they have been asked to recall it. Same instructions and directions are given to all the participants.The researcher used a computer connected to the robot in order to control it.

In addition, the experiment made with different robot behavior for example with gesture condition and without it, also with different task for the participant, such as easy task and difficult one.

The result shows the significant support of the robot gesture for the human.