Gaze-communicative behavior of stuffed-toy robot with joint attention and eye contact based on ambient gaze-tracking

摘要

This paper proposes a gaze-communicative stuffed-toy robot system with joint attention and eye-contact reactions based on ambient gaze-tracking. For free and natural interaction, we adopted our remote gaze-tracking method. Corresponding to the user's gaze, the gaze-reactive stuffed-toy robot is designed to gradually establish 1) joint attention using the direction of the robot's head and 2) eye-contact reactions from several sets of motion. From both subjective evaluations and observations of the user's gaze in the demonstration experiments, we found that i) joint attention draws the user's interest along with the user-guessed interest of the robot, ii) "eye contact" brings the user a favorable feeling for the robot, and iii) this feeling is enhanced when "eye contact" is used in combination with "joint attention." These results support the approach of our embodied gaze-communication model.