Developing a Bidiretional Mutual Gaze Mechanism for Human Robot Interaction

Abstract

Establishing mutual gaze is one of the most

fundamental capabilities to initiate any interaction in both

human-human and human-robot communications. This

capability of mutual gaze is particularly important when

people collaborate over a shared visual space. This paper

proposes a bidirectional mutual gaze mechanism for humanrobot

communication. It is assumed that look at each other

makes the mutual gaze. However, simply looking at each

other alone does not ensure mutual gaze. Both agents also

need to be aware of being watched by the other. In order to

perform mutual gaze effectively, we propose two functions:

gaze crossing and gaze awareness. For gaze crossing, the

system detects the human face and his/her eye region. The

system also tracks the eyeball of the target human by

locating the position of eyeball. After gaze crossing, the

system detects the smile of human which ensure the gaze

awareness. Continuing the flow of communication, the robot

performs eye blinking, head nodding and verbal actions in

response to human. Several software modules are developed

to perform the bidirectional mutual gaze mechanism and

evaluate the effectiveness of each module with several

experimental trials. Moreover, the system is tested in human

initiative and robot initiative mutual gaze cases.