NarRob: A Humanoid Social Storyteller with Emotional Expression Capabilities

In this paper we propose a model of a robotic storyteller, focusing on its abilities to select the most appropriate gestures to accompany the story, trying to manifest also emotions related to the sentence that is being told. The robot is endowed with a repository of stories together with a set of gestures, inspired by those typically used by humans, that the robot learns by observation. The gestures are annotated by a number N of subjects, according to their particular meaning and considering a specific typology. They are exploited by the robot according to the story content to provide an engaging representation of the tale.