Eye contact is an effective means of controlling communication for humans, such as starting communication. It seems that we can make eye contact if we look at each other. However, this alone cannot complete eye contact. In addition, we need to be aware of being looked by each other. We propose a method of active eye contact for human-robot communication considering both conditions. The robot changes its facial expressions according to the observation results of the human to make eye contact.

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... n, we present a robot that can recognize hand gestures after making eye contact with the human to show the effectiveness of eye contact as a means of controlling communication. INTRODUCTION Gaze plays an important role in human communication. Thus, there has been a great deal of research on using gaze or eye movements for human interfaces, which can be considered as communication between humans and machines. Most of them use eye movements for pointing instead of a mouse or a joystick such as choosing an icon [5, 7, 11] . However, unlike arms and hands, eyes are not appropriate for precise pointing. We move our eyes in the direction where the objects exist that we would like to see. However, we do not use our eyes to point something. The main role of gaze in actual human communication is to control the flow of communication. This function can be called meta-communication. Recently, several robots have been proposed using gaze for metacommunication. ROBITA [9] turns to the person speaking in conversation by multiple people. Robovie [8] and Cog [2] are other such examples.