Proactive approach of making eye contact with the target human in multi-party settings

Establishing eye contact with the target agent plays a central role both in human-human and human-robot communications. However, it is not so easy task for the robot to meet eye contact with a particular human. Especially, when the robot and the target human are facing each other initially or the target human is intensely involved his/her task. In this paper, we proposed a conceptual model of eye contact for social robots consisting of three parts: attracting attention, establishing gaze crossing, and displaying gaze awareness. Evaluation experiments with 36 participants reveal the effectiveness of the proposed model in three viewing situations (near peripheral field of view, far peripheral field of view, and out of field of view).