GestAdapt: Workspace-Conditioned Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots

What happened

arXiv:2609.38400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Co-speech gestures for robots must adapt not only to speech and embodiment, but also to the workspace available for performing the motion. Since the same speech can be accompanied by different gestures, a robot can respond to workspace constraints, e.g., gestures for speech next to a wall.

In these scenarios, the robot should gesture in a suitable motion rather than simply correcting an unconstrained one. The GestAdapt framework learns from six complementary co-speech corpora through a shared motion representation and provides support for retargeting to different robot embodiments.

Quantitative evaluation shows that generated motions remain close to the real-motion distribution while respecting the workspace. In a real robot evaluation, all compared motions are retargeted to the Reachy2 humanoid (a robot built in roughly human shape) robot under identical workspace constraints.