Mechanisms of Shared Attention for a Humanoid Robot

Contents

This paper outlines a proposal for constructing mechanisms of shared attention for a humanoid robot through a series of example tasks. Shared attention, the ability to selectively attend to objects that are mutually interesting, is vital for learning from another individual. The platform that we will use in designing this system is the upper-torso humanoid robot called Cog which is currently under construction at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. We present a description of our approach, an outline of the work in progress, and a summary of the work completed so far.