The gaze of a person tends to reflect their interest. This work explores what happens when this statement is taken literally and applied to robots. Here we present a robot system that employs a moving robot head with a screen-based eye model that can direct the robot's gaze to points in physical space and present a reflection-like mirror image of the attended region on top of each eye. We conducted a user study with 33 participants, who were asked to instruct the robot to perform pick-and-place tasks, monitor the robot's task execution, and interrupt it in case of erroneous actions. Despite a deliberate lack of instructions about the role of the eyes and a very brief system exposure, participants felt more aware about the robot's information processing, detected erroneous actions earlier, and rated the user experience higher when eye-based mirroring was enabled compared to non-reflective eyes. These results suggest a beneficial and intuitive utilization of the introduced method in cooperative human-robot interaction.
@article{arxiv.2506.18466,
title = {Mirror Eyes: Explainable Human-Robot Interaction at a Glance},
author = {Matti Krüger and Daniel Tanneberg and Chao Wang and Stephan Hasler and Michael Gienger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.18466},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted to the 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)