A System for Giving Presentations with the NAO Robot

In this paper, we describe our work in developing a presentation system to enable the NAO humanoid robot to give prepared presentations to a human audience. The objective is for the robot to deliver the presentation in a manner that is comparable to a good human presenter. We developed a gesture repository consisting of generally accepted effective hand gestures to use during a presentation. We also developed a Presentation Markup Language (PML) which enables a user with relatively little technical knowledge to specify the components of a presentation such as the text of the speech, the hand gestures to use and at which point, and multimedia elements such as images, audio, and video. From the PML, our system generates a program which tells the robot exactly how to deliver the presentation. The robot presentation system has been internally evaluated with hundreds of speech fragments and the speech algorithms have been enhanced to improve synchronization with gestures and multimedia elements. Several presentations have been successfully delivered to audiences in a range of “live” settings. The robot presentation system also caters for non-standard English speeches, enabling the robot to give presentations that can appeal to audiences of different cultural backgrounds.