Robot Cognition Laboratory, SBRI INSERM U846, Université de Lyon Lyon, France.
Front Neurorobot. 2012 May 3;6:3. doi: 10.3389/fnbot.2012.00003. eCollection 2012.
Human-human interaction in natural environments relies on a variety of perceptual cues. Humanoid robots are becoming increasingly refined in their sensorimotor capabilities, and thus should now be able to manipulate and exploit these social cues in cooperation with their human partners. Previous studies have demonstrated that people follow human and robot gaze, and that it can help them to cope with spatially ambiguous language. Our goal is to extend these findings into the domain of action, to determine how human and robot gaze can influence the speed and accuracy of human action. We report on results from a human-human cooperation experiment demonstrating that an agent's vision of her/his partner's gaze can significantly improve that agent's performance in a cooperative task. We then implement a heuristic capability to generate such gaze cues by a humanoid robot that engages in the same cooperative interaction. The subsequent human-robot experiments demonstrate that a human agent can indeed exploit the predictive gaze of their robot partner in a cooperative task. This allows us to render the humanoid robot more human-like in its ability to communicate with humans. The long term objectives of the work are thus to identify social cooperation cues, and to validate their pertinence through implementation in a cooperative robot. The current research provides the robot with the capability to produce appropriate speech and gaze cues in the context of human-robot cooperation tasks. Gaze is manipulated in three conditions: Full gaze (coordinated eye and head), eyes hidden with sunglasses, and head fixed. We demonstrate the pertinence of these cues in terms of statistical measures of action times for humans in the context of a cooperative task, as gaze significantly facilitates cooperation as measured by human response times.
人类在自然环境中的互动依赖于各种感知线索。人形机器人在其感知运动能力方面变得越来越精细，因此现在应该能够与人类伙伴合作，操纵和利用这些社交线索。以前的研究表明，人们会跟随人和机器人的目光，这可以帮助他们应对空间上模糊的语言。我们的目标是将这些发现扩展到行动领域，以确定人和机器人的目光如何影响人类行动的速度和准确性。我们报告了一项人类合作实验的结果，该实验表明，代理人对其伙伴目光的看法可以显著提高代理人在合作任务中的表现。然后，我们实施了一种启发式能力，通过参与相同合作交互的人形机器人生成这种目光线索。随后的人机实验表明，人类代理确实可以在合作任务中利用其机器人伙伴的预测目光。这使得人形机器人在与人类交流的能力上更具人性化。因此，该工作的长期目标是识别社会合作线索，并通过在协作机器人中实现来验证其相关性。目前的研究为机器人在人机合作任务中提供了生成适当言语和目光线索的能力。在三种条件下操纵目光：全目光（协调的眼睛和头部）、墨镜隐藏的眼睛和固定的头部。我们根据合作任务中人类的动作时间的统计度量来证明这些线索的相关性，因为目光显著地通过人类的反应时间来促进合作。
