Vision-based attention control system for socially interactive robots

A social robot needs to attract the attention of a target human and shift it from his/her current focus to what is sought by the robot. The robot should recognize the current target´s attention level to smoothly perform this attention control. In this paper, we propose a vision-based system to detect the level of attention or willingness of the target person towards the robot and to control his/her attention. The system estimates the attention level from rich visual cues of human´s face and head. Then, by timing target´s attention to determine the appropriate attention level, it generates aware signals and makes eye contact with the target. Finally, the robot shifts the target´s attention to an intended direction. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system is effective in controlling the target´s attention.