Robotic system for making eye contact pro-actively with humans

Meeting eye contact is a most important prerequisite skill of a human to initiate an conversation with others. However, it is not easy task for a robot to meet eye contact with a human if they are not facing each other initially or the human is intensely engaged his/her task. If the robot would like to start communication with a particular person, it should turn its gaze to that person first. However, only such a turning action alone is not always be enough to set up eye contact. Sometimes, the robot should perform some strong actions so that it can capture the human´s attention toward it. In this paper, we proposed a computational model for robots that can pro-actively captures human attention and makes eye contact with him/her. Evaluation experiment by using a robotic head reveals the effectiveness of the proposed model in different viewing infatuations.