Design an intelligent robotic head to interacting with humans

Abstract

Attracting people attention to initiate an interaction is one of the most fundamental social capabilities both for the human and the robot. If the robot would like to communicate a particular person, it should turn its gaze to that person and make eye contact with him/her. However, only such a turning action is not enough to set up an eye contact phenomenon in all cases specially, when the robot and the target person are in greater distance and they are not facing each other. Therefore, the robot should perform some actions so that it can attract the target person before meeting his/her gaze. In this paper, we propose three actions (head turning, head shaking, and reference terms) for the robot as its attention attraction capabilities corresponding to the three viewing situations (near peripheral field of view, far peripheral field of view, and out of field of view) of human. A preliminary experiment using twelve participants confirms the effectiveness of the robot actions to attract human attention.