Can we feel a gaze pressure from a robot? Development of an eye-contact robot

Abstract

We are developing an eye-contact robot, a head robot that can make an eye-contact with humans. The robot can move its head and eyes (gaze directions) freely in pan and tilt directions. Each eye of the robot has two cameras - wide-range and telephoto. With an image from the wide-range camera, it can follow searching objects (such as human faces) in real time. With an image from the telephoto camera, it can detect a head movement and a gaze direction of a human and mimic his behaviors. The gaze interaction experiment (between the robot and human subjects) was conducted. Some interesting results are obtained concerning the effect of gaze manipulations.