Robot Gaze Behavior and Proxemics to Coordinate Conversational Roles in Group Interactions

With more social robots entering different industries such as educational systems, health-care facilities, and even airports, it is important to tackle problems that may hinder high quality interactions in a wild setting including group conversations. This paper presents an autonomous group conversational role coordinator system based on the proxemics of participants in the group with the robot including their distances and orientations. The system accordingly assigns to the group participants around the robot three different statuses: active, bystander, and overhearer. Once the statuses are estimated, the robot autonomously adjusts its gaze pattern in order to adapt to the group dynamics and attributes its attention in relation to the role the member in the group is playing. This system was evaluated through a pilot study (N=16), in which two participants at a time played a trivia game with the robot and had different roles to play within the interaction. The primary results imply that the participants interacting with a robot having this adaptive gaze behavior based on conversational role coordination are more likely to stand closer to the robot. In addition, the robot was perceived as more adaptable, sociable, and socially present as well as more likely to make the participants feel more attended to.