Reflex or Reflection? The Oculomotor Behavior of the Companion Robot, Creating the Impression of Communicating with an Emotional Being

Abstract

The control system of the F-2 companion robot implements a competitive system of rules (scenarios) to model the robot’s reactions to a wide range of events. The system is designed in such a way as to provide balanced responses by the robot to speech utterances and other events recognized by the computer vision system (orientation of the user’s face and gaze, events in the tangram game), as well as to the user’s touches. In this experiment, we apply this system to evaluate two robots that are able to determine the orientation of a person’s face and the direction of the gaze and respond differently to his attention. The implicit reactions of a person to the robot’s gaze and the problems of differences between reflexive and reflex behavior in eye movements in comparison with other communicative actions are considered.