Automatic Joint Attention Generation between Local and Remote Persons through Telepresence Robot’s Behavior*

COVID-19 and technological developments have increased opportunities for remote communication, including online meetings. This has led to a focus on “telepresence avatar robots”, a technology that makes people feel as if they are sharing the same place, even between remote locations. The telepresence avatar robot takes an approach to support communication by generating a realistic sense of conversation by incorporating technologies such as camera motion and eye contact with the speaker. However, these approaches involve conscious manipulation by the robot operator of actions that are unconsciously performed by the human operator. Compared to local communication, it is difficult to achieve a sense of presence for the robot operator. In contrast, we implemented autonomous behavior similar to the joint attention that humans unconsciously perform, and verified whether the robot operator feels that he or she is performing joint attention and gains a sense of presence through these autonomous behavior. Joint attention is an interaction in which both parties share the object of attention in a local conversation and is unconscious. We speculate that when the robot performs this behavior autonomously, the robot operator’s awareness of the person confronting the robot and the remote environment increases, creating a sense of presence as the operator gains a sense of immersion in the robot. The experimental results suggest that autonomous behavior generates joint attention gaze intention estimation, and that this approach may be a useful method for robot operators to obtain a sense of presence in the environment and to predict the behavior of others.