An Active Vision System for a Social Robot

Motivation: Much of human social behavior is influenced by the directional, foveated nature of our visual perception. We have developed characteristic eye and head movements to serve the functional requirements of acquiring infor-mation through vision, and we intuitively "read" those movements in others. A humanoid robot whose vision system follows the human organization can enter into this implicit protocol. This introduces an extra dimension to the control problem, where we must design for the social significance that people will assign to the robot's behavior-such as making and breaking eye contact during conversational turn-taking.