Generating connection events for human-robot collaboration

We have developed and tested a reusable Robot Operating System (ROS) module that supports engagement between a human and a humanoid robot by generating appropriate directed gaze, mutual facial gaze, adjacency pair and backchannel connection events. The module implements policies for adding gaze and pointing gestures to referring phrases (including deictic and anaphoric references), performing end-of-turn gazes, responding to human-initiated connection events and maintaining engagement. The module also provides an abstract interface for receiving information from a collaboration manager using the Behavior Markup Language (BML) and exchanges information with our previously developed engagement recognition module.