Mr. Tetsuya Sano and Mr. Akishige Yuguchi mainly conducts this research.

The appearance of android robots is very similar to that of human beings. From their appearance, we expect that androids might provide us with high-level communication. The imitation of human behavior gives us the feeling of natural behavior even if we do not know what drives high-level communication. In this paper, we evaluate the imitation of human eye behavior by an android. We consider that the android imitates human eye behavior while explaining some research topic and a person acts as a listener. Then, we construct a method to imitate the eye behavior obtained from eye trackers. For the evaluation, we asked seventeen male subjects for their subjective evaluation and compared the imitation with an android that controlled eye-contact duration and eyeblinks by editing the imitation or programming rule-based behavior. From the results, we found out that 1) the rule-based behaviors kept human-likeness, 2) 3-second eye contact obtained better scores regardless of the imitation-based or rule-based eye behavior, and 3) the subjects might regard the longer eyeblinks as voluntary eyeblinks, with the intention to break eye contacts.

Eye behavior imitated by one person Eye behavior controlled by a specific rule

Reference

1. T. Sano, A. Yuguchi, G. A. Garcia R., J. Takamatsu, A. Nakazawa, and T. Ogasawara: “Evaluating Imitation of Human Eye Contact and Blinking Behavior Using an Android for Human-like Communication”, Proc. of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2019), 2019.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR17A5, Japan. This work was supported by JST Research Complex Promotion Program.