Acquisition of human-robot joint attention through real-time natural interaction

Joint attention, a process to attend to the object that the other attends to is supposed to be important for human-robot communication as well as for human-human communication. We propose an architecture for acquiring joint attention within a certain time period for realizing natural human-robot interaction. The architecture has two featured modules: a self-organizing map that makes the leaning time shorter and an automatic visual attention selector that let the agent communicate with a human synchronously. We implemented the proposed architecture in a real robot agent and found that 30 minutes was enough for acquiring joint attention with two objects. We can conclude from preliminary experiments that even if the gaze preference of the robot is different from that of the human caregiver, it can acquire joint attention.