Proposal for Interactive Robot Eyes to Achieve Eye Contact between Humans and a Robot

Japan is dealing with a significant decrease in the birth rate and a significant increase in the proportion of its elderly individuals. There is a shortage of overall workers, and there is concern about the lack of caregivers. As one solution for this problem, nursing care robots are drawing attention. Language is an important element in communication between humans and robots, and nonverbal communication such as lines of sight and gestures is also important. Our research on lip movements has revealed that changes in a person's lip movements are influenced by his or her daily physical condition. We have been studying a system that can evaluate human emotion and a human's physical condition based on the human's gaze and lip movements. We are attempting to design a conversational robot that can be used to reduce the burden on caregivers. In the present investigation, we focus on eyes that would be incorporated in a robot, and we designed an eye movement system to realize eye contact between the robot and humans.