Predicting the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot:the Role of Gaze Cues (2404.01986v1)
Abstract: For a service robot, it is crucial to perceive as early as possible that an approaching person intends to interact: in this case, it can proactively enact friendly behaviors that lead to an improved user experience. We solve this perception task with a sequence-to-sequence classifier of a potential user intention to interact, which can be trained in a self-supervised way. Our main contribution is a study of the benefit of features representing the person's gaze in this context. Extensive experiments on a novel dataset show that the inclusion of gaze cues significantly improves the classifier performance (AUROC increases from 84.5% to 91.2%); the distance at which an accurate classification can be achieved improves from 2.4 m to 3.2 m. We also quantify the system's ability to adapt to new environments without external supervision. Qualitative experiments show practical applications with a waiter robot.
- G. A. Zachiotis, G. Andrikopoulos, R. Gornez, K. Nakamura, and G. Nikolakopoulos, “A survey on the application trends of home service robotics,” in IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Biomimetics, 2018, pp. 1999–2006.
- M. K. Lee, S. Kiesler, and J. Forlizzi, “Receptionist or information kiosk: how do people talk with a robot?” in ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative work, 2010, pp. 31–40.
- A. Tuomi, I. P. Tussyadiah, and J. Stienmetz, “Applications and implications of service robots in hospitality,” Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 232–247, 2021.
- J. Urakami and K. Seaborn, “Nonverbal cues in human–robot interaction: A communication studies perspective,” ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 1–21, 2023.
- L. Takayama and C. Pantofaru, “Influences on proxemic behaviors in human-robot interaction,” in IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2009, pp. 5495–5502.
- G. Abbate, A. Giusti, V. Schmuck, O. Celiktutan, and A. Paolillo, “Self-supervised prediction of the intention to interact with a service robot,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 171, p. 104568, 2024.
- N. Gasteiger, M. Hellou, and H. S. Ahn, “Factors for personalization and localization to optimize human–robot interaction: A literature review,” International Journal of Social Robotics, pp. 1–13, 2021.
- S. Saunderson and G. Nejat, “How robots influence humans: A survey of nonverbal communication in social human–robot interaction,” International Journal of Social Robotics, vol. 11, pp. 575–608, 2019.
- J. Rios-Martinez, A. Spalanzani, and C. Laugier, “From proxemics theory to socially-aware navigation: A survey,” International Journal of Social Robotics, vol. 7, pp. 137–153, 2015.
- P. Agand, M. Taherahmadi, A. Lim, and M. Chen, “Human Navigational Intent Inference with Probabilistic and Optimal Approaches,” in IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2022, pp. 8562–8568.
- A. Belardinelli, A. R. Kondapally, D. Ruiken, D. Tanneberg, and T. Watabe, “Intention estimation from gaze and motion features for human-robot shared-control object manipulation,” in IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022, pp. 9806–9813.
- S. Vinanzi, C. Goerick, and A. Cangelosi, “Mindreading for Robots: Predicting Intentions via Dynamical Clustering of Human Postures,” in Int. Conf. on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics, 2019, pp. 272–277.
- A. Zaraki, M. Giuliani, M. B. Dehkordi, D. Mazzei, A. D’ursi, and D. De Rossi, “An RGB-D based social behavior interpretation system for a humanoid social robot,” in RSI/ISM International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics, 2014, pp. 185–190.
- A. Gaschler, S. Jentzsch, M. Giuliani, K. Huth, J. de Ruiter, and A. Knoll, “Social behavior recognition using body posture and head pose for human-robot interaction,” in IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2012, pp. 2128–2133.
- F. Del Duchetto, P. Baxter, and M. Hanheide, “Are you still with me? continuous engagement assessment from a robot’s point of view,” Frontiers in Rob. and AI, vol. 7, p. 116, 2020.
- A. Belardinelli, “Gaze-based intention estimation: principles, methodologies, and applications in HRI,” 2023, arXiv:2302.04530 [cs].
- H. Admoni and B. Scassellati, “Social eye gaze in human-robot interaction: a review,” Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, vol. 6, no. 1, May 2017.
- X. Zhang, Y. Sugano, M. Fritz, and A. Bulling, “Appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild,” in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2015, pp. 4511–4520.
- K. Krafka, A. Khosla, P. Kellnhofer, H. Kannan, S. Bhandarkar, W. Matusik, and A. Torralba, “Eye tracking for everyone,” in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2016, pp. 2176–2184.
- X. Zhang, Y. Sugano, M. Fritz, and A. Bulling, “It’s written all over your face: Full-face appearance-based gaze estimation,” in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition workshops, 2017, pp. 51–60.
- C. Hennessey and J. Fiset, “Long range eye tracking: bringing eye tracking into the living room,” in Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, 2012, pp. 249–252.
- D.-C. Cho and W.-Y. Kim, “Long-range gaze tracking system for large movements,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 3432–3440, 2013.
- M. Zhang, Y. Liu, and F. Lu, “Gazeonce: Real-time multi-person gaze estimation,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022, pp. 4197–4206.
- E. Chong, E. Clark-Whitney, A. Southerland, E. Stubbs, C. Miller, E. L. Ajodan, M. R. Silverman, C. Lord, A. Rozga, R. M. Jones et al., “Detection of eye contact with deep neural networks is as accurate as human experts,” Nature communications, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 6386, 2020.
- M. Lombardi, E. Maiettini, D. De Tommaso, A. Wykowska, and L. Natale, “Toward an attentive robotic architecture: Learning-based mutual gaze estimation in human–robot interaction,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol. 9, p. 770165, 2022.
- M. Brenner, H. Brock, A. Stiegler, and R. Gomez, “Developing an engagement-aware system for the detection of unfocused interaction,” in Int. Symp. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2021, pp. 798–805.
- D. Vaufreydaz, W. Johal, and C. Combe, “Starting engagement detection towards a companion robot using multimodal features,” Robot. Auton. Syst., vol. 75, pp. 4–16, 2016.
- Y. Kato, T. Kanda, and H. Ishiguro, “May I help you? - Design of human-like polite approaching behavior-,” in ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human-Robot Interaction, 2015, pp. 35–42.
- J. Bi, F.-c. Hu, Y.-j. Wang, M.-n. Luo, and M. He, “A method based on interpretable machine learning for recognizing the intensity of human engagement intention,” Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 2537, 2023.
- L. Jing and Y. Tian, “Self-supervised visual feature learning with deep neural networks: A survey,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2020.
- C. Doersch and A. Zisserman, “Multi-task self-supervised visual learning,” in IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, 2017, pp. 2051–2060.
- M. Nava, A. Paolillo, J. Guzzi, L. M. Gambardella, and A. Giusti, “Learning visual localization of a quadrotor using its noise as self-supervision,” IEEE Robot. and Autom. Lett., vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 2218–2225, 2022.
- ——, “Uncertainty-aware self-supervised learning of spatial perception tasks,” IEEE Robot. and Autom. Lett., vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 6693–6700, 2021.
- A. Lookingbill, J. Rogers, D. Lieb, J. Curry, and S. Thrun, “Reverse optical flow for self-supervised adaptive autonomous robot navigation,” International Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 74, pp. 287–302, 2006.
- R. Hadsell, P. Sermanet, J. Ben, A. Erkan, M. Scoffier, K. Kavukcuoglu, U. Muller, and Y. LeCun, “Learning long-range vision for autonomous off-road driving,” J. Field Robot., vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 120–144, 2009.
- J. Pages, L. Marchionni, and F. Ferro, “Tiago: the modular robot that adapts to different research needs,” 2016.
- A. K. Pandey and R. Gelin, “A mass-produced sociable humanoid robot: Pepper: The first machine of its kind,” IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag., pp. 1–1, 07 2018.
- S. Hochreiter and J. Schmidhuber, “Long short-term memory,” Neural computation, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 1735–1780, 1997.
- S. Arreghini, G. Abbate, A. Giusti, and A. Paolillo, “A long-range mutual gaze detector for HRI,” in ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024, pp. –.