“I’ll Be There Next”

Abstract

In this article, we discuss our findings from an ethnographic study at an elderly care center where we observed the utilization of two different functions of human gaze to convey service order (i.e., “who is served first and who is served next”). In one case, when an elderly person requested assistance, the gaze of the care worker communicated that he/she would serve that client next in turn. In the other case, the gaze conveyed a request to the service seeker to wait until the care worker finished attending the current client. Each gaze function depended on the care worker's current engagement and other behaviors. We sought to integrate these findings into the development of a robot that might function more effectively in multiple human-robot party settings. We focused on the multiple functions of gaze and bodily actions, implementing those functions into our robot. We conducted three experiments to gauge a combination of gestures and gazes performed by our robot. This article demonstrates that the employment of gaze is an important consideration when developing robots that can interact effectively in multiple human-robot party settings.