Joint Attention Estimator

Joint attention has been identified as a critical component of successful human machine teams. Teaching robots to develop awareness of human cues is an important first step towards attaining and maintaining joint attention. We present a joint attention estimator that creates many possible candidates for joint attention and chooses the most likely object based on a human teammate's hand cues. Our system works within natural human interaction time (< 3 seconds) and above 80% accuracy. Our joint attention estimator provides a meaningful step towards ensuring robots enable human social skills for successful human machine teaming.