Implementing a gaze control system on a social robot in multi-person interactions

Abstract

Empowering a robot to direct its attention to the most appropriate target at all times during multi-party interactions is an interesting and useful challenge to establish natural communication between the robot and users. In this paper, implementing a social gaze control system suitable for multi-person interactions with a RASA social robot is discussed. This system takes some important verbal and non-verbal social cues into account, and at each moment enables the robot to decide socially at which human it should direct its gaze. The algorithm for the target selection has been enhanced, compared to past studies, by quantitating the effects of distance and orientation on grabbing humans’ attention in addition to the inherent importance of each cue in communications based on the gaze behavior of a group of human participants. After this was completed, another group of volunteers were employed to examining the performance of the RASA robot equipped with this system. Their average gaze pattern was compared with the targets selected by the robot in a real situation, and their opinions on the sociability and intelligence of the system were recorded. We indicated that the gaze generated by the robotic system matched the average gaze pattern of the participants 76.9% in an 80-s real-life scenario. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire showed us that ~ 90% of the subjects felt that at times RASA was really looked at them with a quite high average score of 4.33 out of 5.