Development of an active listening expression method by eye opening degree control using Pupiloid

Abstract

In human communication, a listener's active attitude brings comfort to the speaker and promotes acceptance and empathy. Especially in the counseling, in addition to linguistic and semantic understanding, it is important to generate the acceptive and empathetic attitude based on nonverbal information. Therefore, it is expected that the listening mechanism that actively relates to the speaker can be constructed by introducing the listener's attitude into social robots. We focused on the pupil response that is closely related to human interests, and developed a pupil response robot called Pupiloid. Pupiloid can generate various pupil responses based on the speech. In this study, focusing on eyelids that are related to the human internal state and interest, and developed a listening expression method that controls the degree of eye opening using the Pupiloid. This method expresses the strength of robot's interest by controlling the angle of eyelids in addition to the size of pupils. The effectiveness of the method was confirmed by the questionnaire at an exhibition.