While many social robots already include carefully designed robotic faces, functional robot eyes that meet human expectations are still an open challenge. As a consequence, many robots either have cameras separated from their robot eyes or active camera heads missing an anthropomorphic face. In this paper, we propose a new robot eye that is integrated in the anthropomorphic robot head Floka and fulfills a similar technical specification as a human eye including zero backlash, an increased range of motion, high velocities and accelerations, an integrated high resolution camera, and fast actuated eyelids. The robot eye is built using state-of-the-art off-the-shelf components and the CAD model of our prototype is available free of charge on request for non-commercial applications. We evaluate the technical properties of the robot eye and show that it meets and partially outperforms human eye movements and saccades.

In this paper, we present our humanoid robot "Meka", participating in a multi party human robot dialogue scenario. Active arbitration of the robot's attention based on multi-modal stimuli is utilised to observe persons which are outside of the robots field of view. We investigate the impact of this attention management and addressee recognition on the robot's capability to distinguish utterances directed at it from communication between humans. Based on the results of a user study, we show that mutual gaze at the end of an utterance, as a means of yielding a turn, is a substantial cue for addressee recognition. Verification of a speaker through the detection of lip movements can be used to further increase precision. Furthermore, we show that even a rather simplistic fusion of gaze and lip movement cues allows a considerable enhancement in addressee estimation, and can be altered to adapt to the requirements of a particular scenario.