Now, Over Here: Leveraging Extended Attentional Capabilities in Human-Robot Interaction

Competent collaboration between robots and people in the open world requires sensing and reasoning about transitions of people's attention to the robots themselves, as well as to other people and objects in the environment. We present challenges and opportunities with designing extended attentional capabilities for interactive systems, including the need to track, reason about, and manage the attentional foci of all actors. We describe work in progress to leverage such attentional capabilities for interaction management with a prototype situated robotic system.