Controlling human attention through robot's gaze behaviors

Controlling someone's attention can be defined as shifting his/her attention from the existing direction to another. However, it is not easy task for a robot to shift a particular human's attention if they are not in face-to-face situation. If the robot would like to communicate a particular person, it should turn its gaze to that person and make eye contact to establish mutual gaze. However, only such a turning action is not enough to set up eye contact when the robot and the target person are not facing each other. Therefore, the robot should perform some actions so that it can attract the target person and meet their gaze. In this paper, we present a robot that can attract a target person's attention by moving its head, make eye contact through showing gaze awareness by blinking its eyes, and establish joint attention by repeating its head turns from the person and the target object. Experiments using twenty human participants confirm the effectiveness of the robot actions to control human attention.