Motion-oriented attention for a social gaze robot behavior

Abstract

Various studies have shown that human visual attention is generally attracted by motion in the field of view. In order to embody this kind of social behavior in a robot, its gaze should focus on key points in its environment, such as objects or humans moving. In this paper, we have developed a social natural attention system and we explore the perception of people while interacting with a robot in three different situations: one where the robot has a totally random gaze behavior, one where its gaze is fixed on the person in the interaction, and one where its gaze behavior adapts to the motion-based environmental context. We conducted an online survey and an on-site experiment with the Meka robot so as to evaluate people’s perception towards these three types of gaze. Our results show that motion-oriented gaze can help to make the robot more engaging and more natural to people.