The effects of responsive eye movement and blinking behavior in a communication robot

In face-to-face communication, eyes play a central role, for example in directing attention and regulating turn-taking. For this reason, it has been a central topic in several fields of interaction study. Although many psychology findings have encouraged previous work in both human-computer and human-robot interaction studies, so far there have been few explorations on how to move the agent´s eye, including when to move it, for communication. Therefore, it is this topic we address in this study. The impression a person forms from an interaction is strongly influenced by the degree to which their partner´s gaze direction correlates with their own. In this paper, we propose methods of controlling a robot´s gaze responsively to its partner´s gaze and confirm the effect of this on the feeling of being looked at, which is considered to be the basis of conveying impressions using gaze in face-to-face interaction experiments. Furthermore, an additional preliminary experiment with an on-screen agent shows the possibility of using blinking behaviour as another modality for responding to a partner