Are Robots' Gestures Understood? A Study on the Factors Influencing how Humans Perceive Information Present in Robot Gestures

Social robots become increasingly important in various social domains like healthcare, education, and industry. In this paper, we explore whether humans understand the meaning conveyed by robot gestures when they occur alongside speech and other co-speech gestures with no meaning. We analyzed human comprehension of basic shapes presented through robot gestures varying gesture size and verbal context. Our findings show that humans notice robot gestures but struggle to understand the information provided by them. Explicitly directing attention to robot gestures improves understanding. Moreover, providing indirect information about robot's capabilities to gesture enhances the human ability to extract the correct information from gestures, with the effect linearly increasing with the number of observations of the robot.