Vision-based attention control system for socially interactive robots

A social robot needs to attract the attention of a target human and shift it from his/her current focus to what is sought by the robot. The robot should recognize the current target's attention level to smoothly perform this attention control. In this paper, we propose a vision-based system to detect the level of attention or willingness of the target person towards the robot and to control his/her attention. The system estimates the attention level from rich visual cues of human's face and head. Then, by timing target's attention to determine the appropriate attention level, it generates aware signals and makes eye contact with the target. Finally, the robot shifts the target's attention to an intended direction. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system is effective in controlling the target's attention.