Naturalistic Conversational Gaze Control for Humanoid Robots - A First Step

In this paper we introduce a new model for conversational gaze control for robots with physical eyes. We describe our modeling approach and present the results of a set of exploratory experiments. The work illustrated here is a first step of a larger research program dedicated to the development of a conversational gaze controller (CGC) for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The study presented has pilot character and was designed to inform the next development steps of the model. Despite the limitations of the presented version of the model, our results are in line with the findings of previous studies and illustrate the importance of eye movements for HRI.