Towards learning through robotic interaction alone: the joint guided search task

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically inspired approach for robotic joint attention, focusing on shared attention through visual guided search and nonverbal behavior exchange to improve human-robot interaction.

Contribution

It proposes a novel joint guided search task that integrates biological attention mechanisms with robotic visual search for shared attention.

Findings

Preliminary framework for shared attention in human-robot interaction

Integration of nonverbal cues in robotic visual search

Potential for improved human-robot collaboration

Abstract

This work proposes a biologically inspired approach that focuses on attention systems that are able to inhibit or constrain what is relevant at any one moment. We propose a radically new approach to making progress in human-robot joint attention called "the joint guided search task". Visual guided search is the activity of the eye as it saccades from position to position recognizing objects in each fixation location until the target object is found. Our research focuses on the exchange of nonverbal behavior toward changing the fixation location while also performing object recognition. Our main goal is a very ambitious goal of sharing attention through probing synthetic foreground maps (i.e. what is being considered by the robotic agent) and the biological attention system of the human.