Museum Guide Robot Moving Its Head for Smooth Communication While Watching Visitors

Face and head movement plays an important role in communication. We observe situations and human actions through vision to obtain information necessary for smooth communication. In order to develop robots that can coexist with humans, it is necessary to take into account vision. In this paper, we will discuss a museum guide robot that can move its head in a communicative way while explaining exhibits to visitors as well as detect human faces during the explanation of exhibits. We use the analytical results from human behavior to determine and program the robot head movements. We also developed a face detection system so that the guide robot can use visual information to conduct guiding. We developed the system with which the robot starts explaining after having detected a visitor's continuous gaze towards the robot based on the experiment result.