Regions of interest in object selection and hand movement actions by wheeled mobile robot with a manipulator

It is important for multiple robots to engage tasks cooperatively and effectively. In a cooperative work, a robot needs to observe partner robots and anticipate their action. The authors have considered that visual scanpath acts as a key role to detect important regions for the action recognition of the partner because human generally attends to regions-of-interest for such recognition. The authors therefore employed experiments to measure eye movement to investigate properties of regions-of-interest when a subject looks at a scene of the action of hand movement or object selection by a wheeled mobile robot with a manipulator. The result of the experiments suggested that the regions-of-interest were concentrated on the moving hand or running robot, and also acted proactively.