Reciprocal attentive communication in remote meeting with a humanoid robot

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the reciprocal attention modality in remotecommunication. A remote meeting system with a humanoid robot avatar is proposedto overcome the invisible wall for a video conferencing system. Ourexperimental result shows that a tangible robot avatar provides more effectivereciprocal attention against video communication. The subjects in the experimentare asked to determine whether a remote participant with the avatar is activelylistening or not to the local presenter's talk. In this system, the head motionof a remote participant is transferred and expressed by the head motion of ahumanoid robot. While the presenter has difficulty in determining the extentof a remote participant's attention with a video conferencing system, she/he hasbetter sensing of remote attentive states with the robot. Based on theevaluation result, we propose a vision system for the remote user thatintegrates omni-directional camera and robot-eye camera images to provide a wideview with a delay compensation feature.