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.