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arXiv · 2506.18466

Mirror Eyes: Explainable Human-Robot Interaction at a Glance

Matti Krüger·Daniel Tanneberg·Chao Wang·Stephan Hasler·Michael Gienger
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Abstract

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.

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Matti Krüger, Daniel Tanneberg, Chao Wang, Stephan Hasler, Michael Gienger. 2025-06-23. Mirror Eyes: Explainable Human-Robot Interaction at a Glance. https://doi.org/10.1109/ro-man63969.2025.11217810

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