The potential of robot eyes as predictive cues in HRI-an eye-tracking study

Robots currently provide only a limited amount of information about their future movements to human collaborators. In human interaction, communication through gaze can be helpful by intuitively directing attention to specific targets. Whether and how this mechanism could benefit the interaction with robots and how a design of predictive robot eyes in general should look like is not well understood. In a between-subjects design, four different types of eyes were therefore compared with regard to their attention directing potential: a pair of arrows, human eyes, and two anthropomorphic robot eye designs. For this purpose, 39 subjects performed a novel, screen-based gaze cueing task in the laboratory. Participants' attention was measured using manual responses and eye-tracking. Information on the perception of the tested cues was provided through additional subjective measures. All eye models were overall easy to read and were able to direct participants' attention. The anthropomorphic robot eyes were most efficient at shifting participants' attention which was revealed by faster manual and saccadic reaction times. In addition, a robot equipped with anthropomorphic eyes was perceived as being more competent. Abstract anthropomorphic robot eyes therefore seem to trigger a reflexive reallocation of attention. This points to a social and automatic processing of such artificial stimuli.