Robot understands when it has gained a human's attention

Using a socially expressive robot named Simon, from assistant professor Andrea Thomaz’s Socially Intelligent Machines lab, researchers wanted to see if they could tell when he had successfully attracted the attention of a human who was engaged in a task and when he had not.

‘The primary focus was trying to give Simon the ability to understand when a human being seems to be reacting appropriately, or in some sense is interested in getting a response from Simon, and to be able to do it using a visual medium, a camera,’ said Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.

‘Simon would make some form of a gesture, or some form of an action when the user was present, and the computer vision task was to try to determine whether or not you had captured the attention of the human being,’ said Bobick.

With close to 80 per cent accuracy Simon was able to tell, using only the cameras as a guide, whether someone was paying attention or not.