A Storytelling Robot: Modeling and Evaluation of Human-like Gaze Behavior

Engaging storytelling is a necessary skill for humanoid robots if they are to be used in education and entertainment applications. Storytelling requires that the humanoid robot be aware of its audience and able to direct its gaze in a natural way. In this paper, we explore how human gaze can be modeled and implemented on a humanoid robot to create a natural, human-like behavior for storytelling. Our gaze model integrates data collected from a human storyteller and a discourse structure model developed by Cassell and her colleagues for human-like conversational agents (1994). We used this model to direct the gaze of a humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO, as he recited a Japanese fairy tale using a pre-recorded human voice. We assessed the efficacy of this gaze algorithm by manipulating the frequency of ASIMO's gaze between two participants and used pre and post questionnaires to assess whether participants evaluated the robot more positively and did better on a recall task when ASIMO looked at them more. We found that participants performed significantly better in recalling ASIMO's story when the robot looked at them more. Our results also showed significant differences in how men and women evaluated ASIMO based on the frequency of gaze they received from the robot. Our study adds to the growing evidence that there are many commonalities between human-human communication and human-robot communication

[1]  Yei Theodora Ozaki.  The Japanese Fairy Book , 1904 .

[2]  Edward T. Hall,et al.  A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior1 , 1963 .

[3]  M. Argyle,et al.  EYE-CONTACT, DISTANCE AND AFFILIATION. , 1965, Sociometry.

[4]  D. Crystal,et al.  Intonation and Grammar in British English , 1967 .

[5]  A. Kendon.  Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. , 1967, Acta psychologica.

[6]  A. Mehrabian.  Inference of attitudes from the posture, orientation, and distance of a communicator. , 1968, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[7]  A. Kendon,et al.  The consistency of gaze patterns in social interaction. , 1969, British journal of psychology.

[8]  R. Fry,et al.  The Effects of Feedback and Eye Contact on Performance of a Digit-Coding Task , 1975 .

[9]  M. Argyle,et al.  Gaze and Mutual Gaze , 1994, British Journal of Psychiatry.

[10]  J. P. Otteson,et al.  Effect of Teacher's Gaze on Children's Story Recall , 1980 .

[11]  L. Hayduk.  Personal space: Where we now stand. , 1983 .

[12]  C. Kleinke.  Gaze and eye contact: a research review. , 1986, Psychological bulletin.

[13]  J. V. Sherwood.  Facilitative Effects of Gaze upon Learning , 1987 .

[14]  Nicole Chovil.  Discourse‐oriented facial displays in conversation , 1991 .

[15]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Animated conversation: rule-based generation of facial expression, gesture & spoken intonation for multiple conversational agents , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[16]  J. Cassell,et al.  Communicative humanoids: a computational model of psychosocial dialogue skills , 1996 .

[17]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Generating Facial Expressions for Speech , 1996, Cogn. Sci..

[18]  Brian Scassellati.  Mechanisms of Shared Attention for a Humanoid Robot , 1998 .

[19]  J. Cassell,et al.  Turn taking vs. Discourse Structure: How Best to Model Multimodal Conversation , 1998 .

[20]  R. Brooks,et al.  The cog project: building a humanoid robot , 1999 .

[21]  Brian Scassellati,et al.  Infant-like Social Interactions between a Robot and a Human Caregiver , 2000, Adapt. Behav..

[22]  Mel Slater,et al.  The impact of eye gaze on communication using humanoid avatars , 2001, CHI.

[23]  Jeremy N. Bailenson,et al.  Equilibrium Theory Revisited: Mutual Gaze and Personal Space in Virtual Environments , 2001, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[24]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[25]  Tetsuo Ono,et al.  Development and evaluation of an interactive humanoid robot "Robovie" , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[26]  T. Kanda,et al.  Robot mediated round table: Analysis of the effect of robot's gaze , 2002, Proceedings. 11th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[27]  Catherine Pelachaud,et al.  Modelling Gaze Behaviour for Conversational Agents , 2003, IVA.

[28]  Hideki Kozima,et al.  Attention coupling as a prerequisite for social interaction , 2003, The 12th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2003. Proceedings. ROMAN 2003..

[29]  Ian R. Fasel,et al.  Face-to-face interactive humanoid robot , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[30]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Explorations in engagement for humans and robots , 2005, Artif. Intell..