A robotic framework for shifting the target human´s attention in multi-party setting

It is a major challenge in HRI to design a robotic agent that is able to direct its partner´s attention from his/her existing attentional focus towards an intended direction. For this purpose, the agent may first turn its gaze to him/her in order to set up eye contact. However, such a turning action of the agent may not in itself be sufficient to establish eye contact with its partner in all cases, especially when the agent and the its partner are not facing each other or the partner is intensely engaged in a task. This paper focuses on designing a robotic framework to shift the target human´s attentional focus toward the robot´s intended direction from multiple humans. For this purpose, we proposed a conceptual framework with three phases: capturing attention, making eye contact, and shifting attention. We conducted an experiment to validate our model in HRI scenarios in which two participant interacted in a session at a time. One of them interacted as a target and other as a non-target. Experimental results with twenty participants shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework.