Recognizing Gaze Pattern for Human Robot Interaction

In this paper, we propose a human-robot interaction system in which the robot detects and classifies the target human's gaze pattern into either spontaneous looking or scene-relevant looking. If the gaze pattern is detected as the spontaneous looking, the robot waits for the target human without disturbing his/her attention. However, if the gaze pattern is detected as the scene-relevant looking, the robot establishes a communication channel with him/her in order to explain about the scene. We have implemented the proposed system into a robot, Robovie-R3 as a museum guide robot and tested the system to confirm its effectiveness.