Human–human interaction in natural environments relies on a variety of perceptual cues. Humanoid robots are becoming increasingly refined in their sensorimotor capabilities, and thus should now be able to manipulate and exploit these social cues in cooperation with their human partners. Previous studies have demonstrated that people follow human and robot gaze, and that it can help them to cope with spatially ambiguous language. Our goal is to extend these findings into the domain of action, to determine how human and robot gaze can influence the speed and accuracy of human action. We report on results from a human–human cooperation experiment demonstrating that an agent’s vision of her/his partner’s gaze can significantly improve that agent’s performance in a cooperative task. We then implement a heuristic capability to generate such gaze cues by a humanoid robot that engages in the same cooperative interaction. The subsequent human–robot experiments demonstrate that a human agent can indeed exploit the predictive gaze of their robot partner in a cooperative task. This allows us to render the humanoid robot more human-like in its ability to communicate with humans. The long term objectives of the work are thus to identify social cooperation cues, and to validate their pertinence through implementation in a cooperative robot. The current research provides the robot with the capability to produce appropriate speech and gaze cues in the context of human–robot cooperation tasks. Gaze is manipulated in three conditions: Full gaze (coordinated eye and head), eyes hidden with sunglasses, and head fixed. We demonstrate the pertinence of these cues in terms of statistical measures of action times for humans in the context of a cooperative task, as gaze significantly facilitates cooperation as measured by human response times.

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In the present work we observe two subjects interacting in a collaborative task on a shared environment. One goal of the experiment is to measure the change in behavior with respect to gaze when one interactant is wearing dark glasses and hence his/her gaze is not visible by the other one. The results show that if one subject wears dark glasses while telling the other subject the position of a certain cube, the other subject needs significantly more time to locate and move this cube. Hence, eye gaze-when visible-of one subject looking at a certain cube speeds up the location of the cube by the other subject. The second goal of the currently ongoing work is to collect data on the multimodal behavior of one of the subjects by means of audio recording, eye gaze and head motion tracking in order to build a model that can be used to control a robot in a comparable scenario in future experiments.