Human behavioural responses to robot head gaze during robot-to-human handovers - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Human behavioural responses to robot head gaze during robot-to-human handovers

Minhua Zheng, A. Jung Moon, Brian Gleeson, Daniel M. Troniak, Matthew K. X. J. Pan, Benjamin A. Blumer, Max Q. H. Meng, and Elizabeth A. Croft
Conference Paper, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO '14), pp. 362 - 367, December, 2014

Abstract

A robot that can fluently hand over objects to people can be useful in many applications. In an effort to develop a fluent robot-to-human handover system, this work investigates people's behavioural responses to a robot that hands over objects to them while using different types of gaze cues. In our previous work, we found empirical evidence that the use of a robot's head gaze can affect a person's timing of reaching towards the offered object. In this paper, we investigate this effect further by exploring the manner in which human's reaching and gaze behaviours are affected by a robot's head gaze. We conducted a video-based investigation of 97 naïve participants' behavioural responses to robot-to-human handovers. Through a frame-by-frame analysis, we recorded a detailed timeline of the robot's and human's gaze and reaching behaviours. Results confirm the finding from our previous study that the robot's head gaze can significantly impact the timing of human receiver's reaching behaviour during handovers. In addition, our results demonstrate that the robot's head gaze affects human's gaze behaviour during handovers, and this effect explains some unexpected findings in our previous work.

BibTeX

@conference{Zheng-2014-126600,
author = {Minhua Zheng and A. Jung Moon and Brian Gleeson and Daniel M. Troniak and Matthew K. X. J. Pan and Benjamin A. Blumer and Max Q. H. Meng and Elizabeth A. Croft},
title = {Human behavioural responses to robot head gaze during robot-to-human handovers},
booktitle = {Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO '14)},
year = {2014},
month = {December},
pages = {362 - 367},
}