Abstract

The main objective of this project is to develop an robot that controls the attention of a person. Controlling the attention of a person can be defined as changing his attention from the existing direction to another direction. If there is no face-to-face situation between robot and person, then it is very difficult to shift the attention of that person.

If the robot wants to communicate with a particular person, then it should turn its gaze to that person and should make eye contact with person to establish the mutual gaze. However, only such action is not enough to establish the eye contact between the robot and the target person, when they are not facing each other.

Hence, the robot should perform few actions to attract the target person and meet their gaze. In this project, we developed a robot that can attract the attention of a person by making eye contact with person, moving its head, showing gaze awareness by blinking its eyes, and create joint attention by repeating its head turns from the target object and the person. The experiment on people has confirmed the effectiveness of the robot actions to control human attention.