Attention Mechanisms for Social Engagements of Robots with Multiple People

Social robots need to have special human-robot interaction (HRI) systems to be accepted by people as natural partners. This paper first describes a multiple agent-based architecture designed to support HRI and then introduces an engagement mechanism based on attention distraction. The monitoring agent is a high-level agent that monitors and evaluates the surrounding environment and people. The interaction agent is another high-level agent that facilitates the seamless interaction between the robot and humans. The capability agent is a compound agent within the robot that is responsible for the robot´s abilities and actions. The use of multiple HRI modalities in the engagement mechanism provides means for people to solicit the robot´s attention while allowing the robot to ignore the distraction if it has recently become engaged with something else. The system has been successfully implemented and tested on a Pioneer 3-AT mobile robot