An Empirical Framework to Control Human Attention by Robot

Abstract

Human attention control simply means that the shifting of one's attention from one direction to another. To shift someone's attention, gaining attention and meeting gaze are two most important pre-requisites. If a person would like to communicate with another, the person's gaze should meet the receiver's gaze, and they should make eye contact. However, it is difficult to set up eye contact when the two people are not facing each other in non-linguistic way. Therefore, the sender should perform some actions to capture the receiver's attention so that they can meet face-to-face and establish eye contact. In this paper, we focus on what is the best action for a robot to attract human attention and how human and robot display gazing behavior each other for eye contact. In our system, the robot may direct its gaze toward a particular direction after making eye contact and the human will read the robot's gaze. As a result, s/he will shift his/her attention to the direction indicated by the robot gaze. Experimental results show that the robot's head motions can attract human attention, and the robot's blinking when their gaze meet can make the human feel that s/he makes eye contact with the robot.