In child-robot interaction, the element of trust towards the robot is critical. This is particularly important the first time the child meets the robot, as the trust gained during this interaction can play a decisive role in future interactions. We present an in-the-wild study where Polish kindergartners interacted with a Pepper robot. The videos of this study were analyzed for the issues of trust, anthropomorphization, and reaction to malfunction, with the assumption that the last two factors influence the children's trust towards Pepper. Our results reveal children's interest in the robot performing tasks specific for humans, highlight the importance of the conversation scenario and the need for an extended library of answers provided by the robot about its abilities or origin and show how children tend to provoke the robot.

We report the results of an empirical study on gaze aversion during dyadic human-to-human conversation in an interview setting. To address various methodological challenges in as- sessing gaze-to-face contact, we followed an approach where the experiment was conducted twice, each time with a different set of interviewees. In one of them the interviewer’s gaze was tracked with an eye tracker, and in the other the interviewee’s gaze was tracked. The gaze sequences obtained in both experiments were analyzed and modeled as Discrete-Time Markov Chains. The results show that the interviewer made more frequent and longer gaze contacts compared to the interviewee. Also, the interviewer made mostly diagonal gaze aversions, whereas the interviewee made sideways aversions (left or right). We discuss the relevance of this research for Human-Robot Interaction, and discuss some future research problems.

Two common channels through which humans communicate are speech andgaze. Eye gaze is an important mode of communication: it allows people tobetter understand each others’ intentions, desires, interests, and so on. The goalof this research is to develop a framework for gaze triggered events which canbe executed on a robot and mobile devices and allows to perform experiments.We experimentally evaluate the framework and techniques for extracting gazedirection based on a robot-mounted camera or a mobile-device camera whichare implemented in the framework. We investigate the impact of light on theaccuracy of gaze estimation, and also how the overall accuracy depends on usereye and head movements. Our research shows that the light intensity is im-portant, and the placement of light source is crucial. All the robot-mountedgaze detection modules we tested were found to be similar with regard to ac-curacy. The framework we developed was tested in a human-robot interactionexperiment involving a job-interview scenario. The flexible structure of thisscenario allowed us to test different components of the framework in variedreal-world scenarios, which was very useful for progressing towards our long-term research goal of designing intuitive gaze-based interfaces for human robotcommunication.

We present a flexible human-robot interaction architecture that incorporates emotions and moods to provide a natural experience for humans. To determine the emotional state of the user, information representing eye gaze and facial expression is combined with other contextual information such as whether the user is asking questions or has been quiet for some time. Subsequently, an appropriate robot behaviour is selected from a multi-path scenario. This architecture can be easily adapted to interactions with non-embodied robots such as avatars on a mobile device or a PC. We present the outcome of evaluating an implementation of our proposed architecture as a whole, and also of its modules for detecting emotions and questions. Results are promising and provide a basis for further development.