Responsive robot gaze to interaction partner

Abstract

Eyes play a central role in human-human communication, for example, in directing attention and regulating turntaking. For this reason, the eyes have been a central topic in several fields of interaction study. Although many psychological findings have encouraged previous work in both human-computer and human-robot interaction studies, there have been few explorations from the viewpoint of the timing of gaze behavior. In this study, the impression a person forms from an interaction is regarded to be strongly influenced by the feeling of being looked at which is assumed to be based on the responsiveness of the other's gaze to the person's one and be the basis of impression conveyance as a communicative being. In this paper, we built a robot that could move its gaze responsively to its interaction partner's one to explore the effect of responsive gaze. In this paper, we evaluated two primitive ways of controlling a robot's gaze responsively to its partner and confirmed that robots with such responsive gaze could give stronger feeling of being looked at than ones with non-responsive gaze.