Impact of Human Gaze Behavior and Robot Appearance on Motion Uncertainty during Cooperative Hand Movement Tasks

Abstract

Results from a study on human gaze behavior during a synchronous human-robot arm movement task with incongruent motions and robot appearance variation are presented. Significant interactions of human gaze behavior and robot appearance (presence or absence of a robot head) towards deviations of human hand movements from task direction are found. Depending on the level of humanoid embodiment, different gaze strategies lead to different deviations from task motion, which may be explained with different allocation of attention in pursuit and static point fixation behaviors. Besides a better understanding of gaze dependent impact of robot appearance on interaction, a practical implication is the potential for deriving respective situational uncertainty models of human motion in order to improve safety and efficiency of close human-robot interaction.