Recognizing engagement in human-robot interaction

Based on a study of the engagement process between humans, we have developed and implemented an initial computational model for recognizing engagement between a human and a humanoid robot. Our model contains recognizers for four types of connection events involving gesture and speech: directed gaze, mutual facial gaze, conversational adjacency pairs and backchannels. To facilitate integrating and experimenting with our model in a broad range of robot architectures, we have packaged it as a node in the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) framework. We have conducted a preliminary validation of our computational model and implementation in a simple human-robot pointing game.