Choosing answerers by observing gaze responses for museum guide robots

This paper presents a method of selecting the answerer from audiences for a museum guide robot. We performed the preliminary experiments that a robot distributed its gaze towards visitors to select an answerer and analyzed visitors' responses. From these experiments, we have found that the visitors who are asked questions by the robot feel embarrassed when they have no prior knowledge about the question and the visitor's gaze during the question plays an important role to avoid being asked question. Based on these findings we developed functions for a guide robot to select the answerer by observing behaviors of multiple visitors. Multiple visitors' head motions are tracked and recognized by using an omni-directional camera and a laser range sensor. The robot detects the visitors' positive and negative responses by observing their head motions while asking questions. We confirmed the effectiveness of our method by experiments.