We focus on a fundamental looking behavior in human-robot interactions—gazing at each other's face. Eye contact and mutual gaze between two social partners are critical in smooth human-human interactions. Therefore, investigating at what moments and in what ways a robot should look at a human user's face as a response to the human's gaze behavior is an important topic. Toward this goal, we developed a gaze-contingent human-robot interaction system, which relied on momentary gaze behaviors from a human user to control an interacting robot in real time. Using this system, we conducted an experiment in which human participants interacted with the robot in a joint-attention task. In the experiment, we systematically manipulated the robot's gaze toward the human partner's face in real time and then analyzed the human's gaze behavior as a response to the robot's gaze behavior. We found that more face looks from the robot led to more look-backs (to the robot's face) from human participants, and consequently, created more mutual gaze and eye contact between the two. Moreover, participants demonstrated more coordinated and synchronized multimodal behaviors between speech and gaze when more eye contact was successfully established and maintained.

中文翻译：

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见你见我

我们专注于人机交互中的基本外观行为——凝视对方的脸。两个社交伙伴之间的目光接触和相互凝视对于人与人的顺畅互动至关重要。因此，研究机器人应该在什么时候以什么方式看人类用户的脸作为对人类注视行为的反应是一个重要的课题。为了实现这一目标，我们开发了一种注视条件人机交互系统，该系统依靠人类用户的瞬间注视行为来实时控制交互机器人。使用该系统，我们进行了一项实验，其中人类参与者在联合注意任务中与机器人进行交互。在实验中，我们实时系统地操纵机器人注视人类伙伴的面部，然后分析人类的“ s 注视行为作为对机器人注视行为的响应。我们发现机器人更多的面部表情会导致人类参与者更多的回看（机器人的面部），从而在两者之间产生更多的相互凝视和目光接触。此外，当成功建立和维持更多的目光接触时，参与者在言语和凝视之间表现出更加协调和同步的多模态行为。