Directing human attention with pointing

Xun Wang, Mary-Anne Williams, Peter Gardenfors, Jonathan Vitale, Shaukat Abidi, Benjamin Johnston, Benjamin Kuipers, Alan Huang
2014 The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication  
Pointing is a typical means of directing a human's attention to a specific object or event. Robot pointing behaviours that direct the attention of humans are critical for human-robot interaction, communication and collaboration. In this paper, we describe an experiment undertaken to investigate human comprehension of a humanoid robot's pointing behaviour. We programmed a NAO robot to point to markers on a large screen and asked untrained human subjects to identify the target of the robots
more » ... ng gesture. We found that humans are able to identify robot pointing gestures. Human subjects achieved higher levels of comprehension when the robot pointed at objects closer to the gesturing arm and when they stood behind the robot. In addition, we found that subjects performance improved with each assessment task. These new results can be used to guide the design of effective robot pointing behaviours that enable more effective robot to human communication and improve human-robot collaborative performance.
doi:10.1109/roman.2014.6926249 dblp:conf/ro-man/WangWGVAJKH14 fatcat:ufktgofrnngq5n47q5qabkmoba