Effect of robot’s gaze behaviors for attracting and controlling human attention

摘要

Abstract Controlling someone’s attention can be defined as shifting his/her attention from the existing direction to another. To shift someone’s attention, gaining attention and meeting gaze are two most important prerequisites. If a robot would like to communicate a particular person, it should turn its gaze to him/her for eye contact. However, it is not an easy task for the robot to make eye contact because such a turning action alone may not be effective in all situations, especially when the robot and the human are not facing each other or the human is intensely attending to his/her task. Therefore, the robot should perform some actions so that it can attract the target person and make him/her respond to the robot to meet gaze. In this paper, we present a robot that can attract a target person’s attention by moving its head, make eye contact through showing gaze awareness by blinking its eyes, and directs his/her attention by repeating its eyes and head turns from the person to the target object. Experiments using 20 human participants confirm the effectiveness of the robot actions to control human attention. Keywords: human–robot interactionattention controlgazeeye contactface detection Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Mr. Takayuki Sato (UEC) and Dr. Sachiko Kodama (UEC), for providing their CG eye images. This work was supported by JST, CREST. Notes Note 1. Silences of more than 4 s become embarrassing because they imply a breaking of the thread of communication.[Citation41]