We explore multimodal communication in robot agents and focus on communicative gesturing as a means to improve naturalness in the human–robot interactions and to create shared context between the user and the robot. We discuss challenges related to accurate timing and acute perception of the partner’s gestures, so as to support appropriate presentation of the message and understanding of the partner’s speech. We also discuss how such conversational behavior can be modelled for a robot agent in context-aware dialogue modelling. The chapter discusses technologies and the building of models for appropriate and adequate gesturing in HRI and presents some experimental research that addresses the challenges. The aim of the research is to gain better understanding of the gesture modality in HRI as well as to explore innovative solutions to improve human well-being and quality of life in the current society. The article draws examples from the AICO corpus which is collected for the purposes of comparative gaze and gesture studies between human–human and human–robot interactions.

Given the current state of mobile robotics, what can be considered essentially solved and what tasks remain? It is clear that for restrictive environments and for limited tasks, autonomous systems can be readily developed. Tasks such as parts delivery in a warehouse, materials transport in hospitals, limited autonomous driving, and so on can all be “solved” for tight definitions of the task and provided that sometime restrictive assumptions can be made concerning the environment.