  Telepresence robots are used in various forms in various use-cases that helps
to avoid physical human presence at the scene of action. In this work, we focus
on a telepresence robot that can be used to attend a meeting remotely with a
group of people. Unlike a one-to-one meeting, participants in a group meeting
can be located at a different part of the room, especially in an informal
setup. As a result, all of them may not be at the viewing angle of the robot,
a.k.a. the remote participant. In such a case, to provide a better meeting
experience, the robot should localize the speaker and bring the speaker at the
center of the viewing angle. Though sound source localization can easily be
done using a microphone-array, bringing the speaker or set of speakers at the
viewing angle is not a trivial task. First of all, the robot should react only
to a human voice, but not to the random noises. Secondly, if there are multiple
speakers, to whom the robot should face or should it rotate continuously with
every new speaker? Lastly, most robotic platforms are resource-constrained and
to achieve a real-time response, i.e., avoiding network delay, all the
algorithms should be implemented within the robot itself. This article presents
a study and implementation of an attention shifting scheme in a telepresence
meeting scenario which best suits the needs and expectations of the collocated
and remote attendees. We define a policy to decide when a robot should rotate
and how much based on real-time speaker localization. Using user satisfaction
study, we show the efficacy and usability of our system in the meeting
scenario. Moreover, our system can be easily adapted to other scenarios where
multiple people are located.
