Gesture-based attention direction for a telepresence robot: Design and experimental study

The application of robotics to telepresence can enhance user interaction experience by providing embodiment, engaging behaviors, automatic control, and human perception. This paper presents a new telepresence robot with gesture-based attention direction to orient the robot towards attention targets according to human deictic gestures. Gesture-based attention direction is realized by combining Localist Attractor Network (LAN) and Short-Term Memory (STM).We also propose audio-visual fusion based on context-dependent prioritization among the 3 types of audio-visual cues (gesture, speech source location, head location). Experiment results are very promising and show that i) the average gesture recognition rate is 92%, i) gesture-based attention direction rate is 90%, and that ii) only by considering the 3 types of audio-visual cues together can the robot perform on par with a human in directing attention to the correct person in a meeting scenario.