Effects of Robotic Blinking Behavior for Making Eye Contact with Humans

Establishing eye contact with the target human plays a central role both in human-human and human-robot communications. A person seems that s/he meet eye contact with the other when they are looking at each other eyes. However, such a looking behavior alone is not enough, displaying gaze awareness behavior also necessary for making successful eye contact. In this paper, we proposed a robotic framework that can establish eye contact with the human in terms two phases: gaze crossing and gaze awareness. We evaluated a primitive way of displaying robot’sgaze behaviors to its partner and confirmed that the robot withsuch gaze behaviors could give stronger feeling of being lookedat and better feeling of making eye contact than ones with absent of such behaviors.A preliminary experiment with a robotic head shows the effectiveness of using blinking behavior as a gaze awareness modality for responding partner.