Physical relation and expression: joint attention for human-robot interaction

This paper investigates situated utterance generation in human-robot interaction. In addition, we study the achievement of joint attention because a person must have joint attention with a robot to identify the object indicated by a situated utterance description generated by the robot. This paper proposes a joint attention mechanism to achieve such joint attention as well as a speech generation system named Linta-III. By using the joint attention mechanism, Linta-III can omit obvious information in the situation from an utterance description. The joint attention mechanism employs eye contact and attention expression functions. These functions are the robot´s physical expressions, and they allow the joint attention mechanism to draw the person´s attention to the same sensor information as that noticed by the robot. We have also conducted a psychological experiment to evaluate the joint attention mechanism. The results indicated that the eye contact and attention expression functions were effective methods in the development of joint attention.