Integrated Demonstrator: Engagement-based Multi-party Dialog with Visual Focus of Attention Extraction

When a robot is situated in an environment containing multiple possible interaction partners, it has to make decisions about when to engage specific users and how to detect and react appropriately to actions of the users that might signal the intention to interact.

In this demonstration we present the integration of an engagement model in a dialog system based on interaction patterns enabling the humanoid robot Nao to play a quiz game with multiple participants. The user’s intention to interact with the system is determined by his visual focus of attention and processing is based on a spatio-temporal working memory. The demonstrator system combines components from two partners in an integrated scenario using the Nao robot.

A video of the demonstration is available on the YouTube channel.