Robotic system for making eye contact pro-actively with humans

Abstract

Meeting eye contact is a most important prerequisite skill of a human to initiate an conversation with others. However, it is not easy task for a robot to meet eye contact with a human if they are not facing each other initially or the human is intensely engaged his/her task. If the robot would like to start communication with a particular person, it should turn its gaze to that person first. However, only such a turning action alone is not always be enough to set up eye contact. Sometimes, the robot should perform some strong actions so that it can capture the human's attention toward it. In this paper, we proposed a computational model for robots that can pro-actively captures human attention and makes eye contact with him/her. Evaluation experiment by using a robotic head reveals the effectiveness of the proposed model in different viewing infatuations.