Page 178 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Infanoid 161

subset of the environment, the constituents of which are mutually manifested
among the participants. The context plays a major role in reducing the com-
putational cost of selecting and segmenting possible referents from the vast
environment and in making their communicative interaction coherent.

• • • •

caregiver object caregiver object
• • • •
robot robot
(1) capture direction (2) identify target

Figure 19.3. Creating joint attention with a caregiver.

Figure 19.3 illustrates how the robot creates and maintains joint attention
with a caregiver. (1) The robot captures the direction of the caregiver’s atten-
tion by reading the direction of the body, arms (reaching/pointing), face, and/
or gaze. (2) The robot does a search in that direction and identifies the object
of the caregiver’s attention. Occasionally the robot diverts its attention back to
the caregiver to check if he or she is still attending to the object.

Figure 19.4. Infanoid engaging in joint attention.

As shown in Figure 19.4, Infanoid creates and maintains joint attention with
the human caregiver. First, its peripheral-view cameras search for a human
face in a cluttered video scene. Once a face is detected, the eyes saccade to the
face and switch to the foveal-view cameras for a close-up image of the face.
From this image, it roughly estimates the direction of the face from the spatial
arrangement of the facial components. Then, Infanoid starts searching in that
direction and identifies the object with salient color and texture like the toys
that infants prefer.