Human Gaze and Focus-of-Attention in Dual Reality Human-Robot Collaboration

Human gaze is an important indicator of the direction of visual focus-of-attention. This information can be very useful in human-robot interaction scenarios. This paper describes a research prototype that utilizes the user's visual attention in a collaborative dual reality environment. We add an additional dimension to existing human-robot interaction scenarios and describe a human-robot collaboration scenario in which the involved human participants are in two different physical locations. One user has the same physical actions space as the robot, the second user is monitoring the setup and thereby collaborating through a virtual reality system. The proposed research prototype monitors the user's visual attention in both real and virtual environments. The prototype also provides information in both the virtual and real environment which results in a dual reality collaboration scenario. As a result, new human-robot interactions brought about by Industrie 4.0, with novel forms of collaborative factory work, can be constructed.