Intention prediction has become a relevant field of research in Human-Machine and Human-Robot Interaction. Indeed, any artificial system (co)-operating with and along humans, designed to assist and coordinate its actions with a human partner, would benefit from first inferring the human's current intention. To spare the user the cognitive burden of explicitly uttering their goals, this inference relies mostly on behavioral cues deemed indicative of the current action. It has been long known that eye movements are highly anticipatory of the single steps unfolding during a task, hence they can serve as a very early and reliable behavioural cue for intention recognition. This review aims to draw a line between insights in the psychological literature on visuomotor control and relevant applications of gaze-based intention recognition in technical domains, with a focus on teleoperated and assistive robotic systems. Starting from the cognitive principles underlying the relationship between intentions, eye movements, and action, the use of eye tracking and gaze-based models for intent recognition in Human-Robot Interaction is considered, with prevalent methodologies and their diverse applications. Finally, special consideration is given to relevant human factors issues and current limitations to be factored in when designing such systems.
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Loria（洛林计算机科学及其应用实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；LIP6（LIP6实验室）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Sorbonne Universités（索邦大学）；UPMC Université Paris 06（巴黎第六大学）；Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR)（智能系统与机器人研究所）；Université Paris 8（巴黎第八大学）
Estimating the engagement is critical for human - robot interaction. Engagement measures typically rely on the dynamics of the social signals exchanged by the partners, especially speech and gaze. However, the dynamics of these signals is likely to be influenced by individual and social factors, such as personality traits, as it is well documented that they critically influence how two humans interact with each other. Here, we assess the influence of two factors, namely extroversion and negative attitude toward robots, on speech and gaze during a cooperative task, where a human must physically…
In gaze based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), it is important to determine the human intention for further interaction. The gaze intention is often modelled as fixation. However, when looking at an object, it is not natural and it is difficult to maintain the gaze fixating on one point for a long time. Saccades may happen while a human is still focusing on the object. The prediction of human intention will be lost during saccades. In addition, while the human intention is on object, the gazes may be located outside of the object bounding box due to different noise sources, which would cause fal…
MindEye-OmniAssist: A Gaze-Driven LLM-Enhanced Assistive Robot System for Implicit Intention Recognition and Task Execution
Hubei Key Laboratory of Brain-Inspired Intelligent Systems, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（脑启发智能系统湖北省重点实验室，华中科技大学）；Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（图像处理与智能控制教育部重点实验室，人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；state key laboratory of intelligent vehicle safety technology, chongqing changan automobile co ltd（智能车辆安全技术 state key laboratory，重庆长安汽车有限公司）；Science and technology innovation center, China ship development and design centre（科技创新中心，中国船舶工业设计研究中心）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）
Eye movement is closely related to limb actions, so it can be used to infer movement intentions. More importantly, in some cases, eye movement is the only way for paralyzed and impaired patients with severe movement disorders to communicate and interact with the environment. Despite this, eye-tracking technology still has very limited application scenarios as an intention recognition method. The goal of this paper is to achieve a natural fixation-based grasping intention recognition method, with which a user with hand movement disorders can intuitively express what tasks he/she wants to do by …
Sheffield Robotics, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学谢菲尔德机器人中心）；Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学心理学系）
Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) research is typically built around the premise that the robot serves to assist a human in achieving a human-led goal or shared task. However, there are many circumstances during HRI in which a robot may need the assistance of a human in shared tasks or to achieve goals. We use the ROBO-GUIDE model as a case study, and insights from social psychology, to examine how a robot's personality can impact on user cooperation. A study of 364 participants indicates that individuals may prefer to use likable social robots ahead of those designed to appear more capable; this …
Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Over the past years, extensive research has been dedicated to developing robust platforms and data-driven dialog models to support long-term human-robot interactions. However, little is known about how people's perception of robots and engagement with them develop over time and how these can be accurately assessed through implicit and continuous measurement techniques. In this paper, we explore this by involving participants in three interaction sessions with multiple days of zero exposure in between. Each session consists of a joint task with a robot as well as two short social chats with it …
Gaze-Aware Task Progression Detection Framework for Human-Robot Interaction Using RGB Cameras
Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（范德比尔特大学阿姆斯特丹计算机科学系）；Department of Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（范德比尔特大学阿姆斯特丹运动科学系）
Gaze-supported Large Language Model Framework for Bi-directional Human-Robot Interaction
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH, Corporate Research（博世集团，企业研究）；Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS)（应用自主传感器系统中心（AASS））
HRI researchers have made major strides in developing robotic architectures that are capable of reading a limited set of social cues and producing behaviors that enhance their likeability and feeling of comfort amongst humans. However, the cues in these models are fairly direct and the interactions largely dyadic. To capture the normative qualities of interaction more robustly, we propose consent as a distinct, critical area for HRI research. Convening important insights in existing HRI work around topics like touch, proxemics, gaze, and moral norms, the notion of consent reveals key expectati…
Furhat Robotics（Furhat机器人公司）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Gaze cues play an important role in human communication and are used to coordinate turn-taking and joint attention, as well as to regulate intimacy. In order to have fluent conversations with people, social robots need to exhibit human-like gaze behavior. Previous Gaze Control Systems (GCS) in HRI have automated robot gaze using data-driven or heuristic approaches. However, these systems tend to be mainly reactive in nature. Planning the robot gaze ahead of time could help in achieving more realistic gaze behavior and better eye-head coordination. In this paper, we propose and implement a nove…
Robot facial expressions and gaze are important factors for enhancing human-robot interaction (HRI), but their effects on human collaboration and perception are not well understood, for instance, in collaborative game scenarios. In this study, we designed a collaborative triadic HRI game scenario, where two participants worked together to insert objects into a shape sorter. One participant assumed the role of a guide. The guide instructed the other participant, who played the role of an actor, by placing occluded objects into the sorter. A humanoid robot issued instructions, observed the inter…
UCLA Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning, and Autonomy (VCLA)（加州大学洛杉矶分校视觉、认知、学习与自主中心（VCLA））
We design and develop a new shared Augmented Reality (AR) workspace for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), which establishes a bi-directional communication between human agents and robots. In a prototype system, the shared AR workspace enables a shared perception, so that a physical robot not only perceives the virtual elements in its own view but also infers the utility of the human agent--the cost needed to perceive and interact in AR--by sensing the human agent's gaze and pose. Such a new HRI design also affords a shared manipulation, wherein the physical robot can control and alter virtual obj…
University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
As autonomous machines such as robots and vehicles start performing tasks involving human users, ensuring a safe interaction between them becomes an important issue. Translating methods from human-robot interaction (HRI) studies to the interaction between humans and other highly complex machines (e.g. semi-autonomous vehicles) could help advance the use of those machines in scenarios requiring human interaction. One method involves understanding human intentions and decision-making to estimate the human's present and near-future actions whilst interacting with a robot. This idea originates fro…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
The software of robotic assistants needs to be verified, to ensure its safety and functional correctness. Testing in simulation allows a high degree of realism in the verification. However, generating tests that cover both interesting foreseen and unforeseen scenarios in human-robot interaction (HRI) tasks, while executing most of the code, remains a challenge. We propose the use of belief-desire-intention (BDI) agents in the test environment, to increase the level of realism and human-like stimulation of simulated robots. Artificial intelligence, such as agent theory, can be exploited for mor…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（产业技术综合研究所（AIST））
This study presents a framework for capturing human attention in the spatio-temporal domain using eye-tracking glasses. Attention mapping is a key technology for human perceptual activity analysis or Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) to support human visual cognition; however, measuring human attention in dynamic environments is challenging owing to the difficulty in localizing the subject and dealing with moving objects. To address this, we present a comprehensive framework, 4D Attention, for unified gaze mapping onto static and dynamic objects. Specifically, we estimate the glasses pose by lever…
Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users in both social and emotional dimensions. Robots used for these tasks must be designed with several user groups in mind, including both individuals receiving therapy and care professionals responsible for the treatment. These robots must also be able to perceive their context of use, recognize human actions and intentions, and follow the therapeutic goals to perform meaningful and personalized t…
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；Centre for Cognitive Science, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学认知科学中心）
Modeling interaction dynamics to generate robot trajectories that enable a robot to adapt and react to a human's actions and intentions is critical for efficient and effective collaborative Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). Learning from Demonstration (LfD) methods from Human-Human Interactions (HHI) have shown promising results, especially when coupled with representation learning techniques. However, such methods for learning HRI either do not scale well to high dimensional data or cannot accurately adapt to changing via-poses of the interacting partner. We propose Multimodal Interactive Laten…
Autonomy Lab, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学计算机科学学院自治实验室）
We present and characterize a simple method for detecting pointing gestures suitable for human-robot interaction applications using a commodity RGB-D camera. We exploit a state-of-the-art Deep CNN-based detector to find hands and faces in RGB images, then examine the corresponding depth channel pixels to obtain full 3D pointing vectors. We test several methods of estimating the hand end-point of the pointing vector. The system runs at better than 30Hz on commodity hardware: exceeding the frame rate of typical RGB-D sensors. An estimate of the absolute pointing accuracy is found empirically by …
Assistive robotic systems endeavour to support those with movement disabilities, enabling them to move again and regain functionality. Main issue with these systems is the complexity of their low-level control, and how to translate this to simpler, higher level commands that are easy and intuitive for a human user to interact with. We have created a multi-modal system, consisting of different sensing, decision making and actuating modalities, leading to intuitive, human-in-the-loop assistive robotics. The system takes its cue from the user's gaze, to decode their intentions and implement low-l…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
Simulation tools are essential for robotics research, especially for those domains in which safety is crucial, such as Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). However, it is challenging to simulate human behaviors, and existing robotics simulators do not integrate functional human models. This work presents Open-VICO, an open-source toolkit to integrate virtual human models in Gazebo focusing on vision-based human tracking. In particular, Open-VICO allows to combine in the same simulation environment realistic human kinematic models, multi-camera vision setups, and human-tracking techniques along wit…
Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Communication in both human-human and human-robot interac-tion (HRI) contexts consists of verbal (speech-based) and non-verbal(facial expressions, eye gaze, gesture, body pose, etc.) components.The verbal component contains semantic and affective information;accordingly, HRI work on the gesture component so far has focusedon rule-based (mapping words to gestures) and data-driven (deep-learning) approaches to generating speech-paired gestures basedon either semantics or the affective state. Consequently, most ges-ture systems are confined to producing either semantically-linkedor affect-based g…
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Goethe University（歌德大学）
Assistive robots can potentially improve the quality of life and personal independence of elderly people by supporting everyday life activities. To guarantee a safe and intuitive interaction between human and robot, human intentions need to be recognized automatically. As humans communicate their intentions multimodally, the use of multiple modalities for intention recognition may not just increase the robustness against failure of individual modalities but especially reduce the uncertainty about the intention to be predicted. This is desirable as particularly in direct interaction between rob…
The functional and temporal roles of gaze evolve across the phases and constraints of multi-stage robot-mediated manipulation
The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（生物机器人研究所，高等圣安娜学院）；Department of Excellence in Robotics and AI, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（机器人与人工智能卓越部门，高等圣安娜学院）
Honda Research Institute EU（本田欧洲研究院）；Honda R&D Co., Ltd. Innovative Research Excellence（本田研发株式会社创新卓越研究中心）
Shared control can help in teleoperated object manipulation by assisting with the execution of the user's intention. To this end, robust and prompt intention estimation is needed, which relies on behavioral observations. Here, an intention estimation framework is presented, which uses natural gaze and motion features to predict the current action and the target object. The system is trained and tested in a simulated environment with pick and place sequences produced in a relatively cluttered scene and with both hands, with possible hand-over to the other hand. Validation is conducted across di…
University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Trust is a critical issue in Human Robot Interactions as it is the core of human desire to accept and use a non human agent. Theory of Mind has been defined as the ability to understand the beliefs and intentions of others that may differ from one's own. Evidences in psychology and HRI suggest that trust and Theory of Mind are interconnected and interdependent concepts, as the decision to trust another agent must depend on our own representation of this entity's actions, beliefs and intentions. However, very few works take Theory of Mind of the robot into consideration while studying trust in …
In this paper, we consider the detection of a decrease of engagement by users spontaneously interacting with a socially assistive robot in a public space. We first describe the UE-HRI dataset that collects spontaneous Human-Robot Interactions following the guidelines provided by the Affective Computing research community to collect data "in-the-wild". We then analyze the users' behaviors, focusing on proxemics, gaze, head motion, facial expressions and speech during interactions with the robot. Finally, we investigate the use of deep learning techniques (Recurrent and Deep Neural Networks) to …
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
Industries such as flexible manufacturing and home care will be transformed by the presence of robotic assistants. Assurance of safety and functional soundness for these robotic systems will require rigorous verification and validation. We propose testing in simulation using Coverage-Driven Verification (CDV) to guide the testing process in an automatic and systematic way. We use a two-tiered test generation approach, where abstract test sequences are computed first and then concretized (e.g., data and variables are instantiated), to reduce the complexity of the test generation problem. To dem…
