Duque-Domingo Jaime, Gómez-García-Bermejo Jaime, Zalama Eduardo
ITAP-DISA, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain.
Front Neurorobot. 2020 Jun 17;14:34. doi: 10.3389/fnbot.2020.00034. eCollection 2020.
When there is an interaction between a robot and a person, gaze control is very important for face-to-face communication. However, when a robot interacts with several people, neurorobotics plays an important role to determine the person to look at and those to pay attention to among the others. There are several factors which can influence the decision: who is speaking, who he/she is speaking to, where people are looking, if the user wants to attract attention, etc. This article presents a novel method to decide who to pay attention to when a robot interacts with several people. The proposed method is based on a competitive network that receives different stimuli (look, speak, pose, hoard conversation, habituation, etc.) that compete with each other to decide who to pay attention to. The dynamic nature of this neural network allows a smooth transition in the focus of attention to a significant change in stimuli. A conversation is created between different participants, replicating human behavior in the robot. The method deals with the problem of several interlocutors appearing and disappearing from the visual field of the robot. A robotic head has been designed and built and a virtual agent projected on the robot's face display has been integrated with the gaze control. Different experiments have been carried out with that robotic head integrated into a ROS architecture model. The work presents the analysis of the method, how the system has been integrated with the robotic head and the experiments and results obtained.
当机器人与人进行交互时，注视控制对于面对面交流非常重要。然而，当机器人与多个人进行交互时，神经机器人学在确定注视对象以及在其他人中关注哪些人方面起着重要作用。有几个因素会影响这一决策：谁在说话、他/她在和谁说话、人们看向哪里、用户是否想吸引注意力等等。本文提出了一种新颖的方法，用于在机器人与多个人进行交互时决定关注谁。所提出的方法基于一个竞争网络，该网络接收不同的刺激（眼神、说话、姿势、对话内容、习惯化等），这些刺激相互竞争以决定关注谁。这种神经网络的动态特性允许在注意力焦点上随着刺激的显著变化进行平滑过渡。在不同参与者之间创建了对话，在机器人中复制了人类行为。该方法解决了多个对话者在机器人视野中出现和消失的问题。设计并制造了一个机器人头部，并将投射在机器人面部显示屏上的虚拟代理与注视控制集成在一起。将那个机器人头部集成到ROS架构模型中进行了不同的实验。这项工作展示了对该方法的分析、系统如何与机器人头部集成以及所进行的实验和获得的结果。
