Robot’s Eye Gaze Affects Behavior of Human Pedestrian Passing by Robot in Virtual Space

Abstract

We explored the influence of robot’s eye gaze on human behavior in interactions when passing each other. Nonverbal communication is important in human interactions, and eye contact in particular affects the way people keep their distance from each other. Furthermore, we devise a design of the robot look at people when passing each other. In addition, we devise to compare with the robot, a faceless robot with a rotating neck and a robot with a face without a rotating neck. In this study, experiments are conducted to the distance between the subject and the robot, and the subject’s eye gaze data of the subject. We observe that the robot gaze at the subject when the subject invades the robot’s perimeter (3.5 meter and 5.5 meter). The robot that gazed at the 5.5-meter perimeter was gazed at more continuously by the subjects than the other robots. Therefore, the design of the robot that gazes at the human at 5.5 meters around the robot may trigger an interaction between the human and the robot when passing each other.