The Six Hug Commandments: Design and Evaluation of a Human-Sized Hugging Robot with Visual and Haptic Perception

Receiving a hug is one of the best ways to feel socially supported, and the lack of social touch can have severe negative effects on an individual's well-being. Based on previous research both within and outside of HRI, we propose six tenets ("commandments") of natural and enjoyable robotic hugging: a hugging robot should be soft, be warm, be human sized, visually perceive its user, adjust its embrace to the user's size and position, and reliably release when the user wants to end the hug. Prior work validated the first two tenets, and the final four are new. We followed all six tenets to create a new robotic platform, HuggieBot 2.0, that has a soft, warm, inflated body (HuggieChest) and uses visual and haptic sensing to deliver closed-loop hugging. We first verified the outward appeal of this platform in comparison to the previous PR2-based HuggieBot 1.0 via an online video-watching study involving 117 users. We then conducted an in-person experiment in which 32 users each exchanged eight hugs with HuggieBot 2.0, experiencing all combinations of visual hug initiation, haptic sizing, and haptic releasing. The results show that adding haptic reactivity definitively improves user perception a hugging robot, largely verifying our four new tenets and illuminating several interesting opportunities for further improvement.Comment: 9 pages, 6 Figures, 2 Tables, ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Conference 202

Friendly but Faulty: A Pilot Study on the Perceived Trust of Older Adults in a Social Robot

The efforts to promote ageing-in-place of healthy older adults via cybernetic support are fundamental to avoid possible consequences associated with relocation to facilities, including the loss of social ties and autonomy, and feelings of loneliness. This requires an understanding of key factors that affect the involvement of robots in eldercare and the elderly willingness to embrace the robots’ domestic use. Trust is argued to be the main foundation of an effective adult-care provider, which might be more significant if such providers are robots. Establishing, and maintaining trust usually involves two main dimensions: 1) the robot’s reliability (i.e., performance) and 2) the robot’s intrinsic attributes, including its degree of anthropomorphism and benevolence. We conducted a pilot study using a mixed methods approach to explore the extent to which these dimensions and their interaction influenced elderly trust in a humanoid social robot. Using two independent variables, type of attitude (warm, cold) and type of conduct (error, no-error), we aimed to investigate if the older adult participants would trust a purposefully faulty robot when the robot exerted a warm behaviour enhanced with non-functional touch more than a robot that did not, and in what way the robot error affected trust. Lastly, we also investigated the relationship between trust and a proxy variable of actual use of robots (i.e., intention to use robots at home ). Given the volatile and context-dependent nature of trust, our close-to real-world scenario of elder-robot interaction involved the administration of health supplements, in which the severity of robot error might have a greater implication on the perceived trust

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

Communication is increasingly moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to ‘ways of feeling’. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally mediated touch for communication: from everyday touch-screens, tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, to the tactile internet of skin. Drawing on literature reviews, new case-study vignettes, and exemplars of digital touch, the book examines the major social debates provoked by digital touch, and investigates social themes central to the communicative potential and societal consequences of digital touch: · Communication environments, capacities and practices · Norms associations and expectations · Presence, absence and connection · Social imaginaries of digital touch · Digital touch ethics and values The book concludes with a discussion of the significance of social understanding and methods in the context of Interdisciplinary collaborations to explore touch, towards the design of digital touch communication, ‘ways of feeling’, that are useable, appropriate, ethical and socially aware

Sensitive skins and somatic processing for affective and sociable robots based upon a somatic alphabet approach

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-251).The sense of touch is one of the most important senses of the human body. This thesis describes the biologically inspired design of "sensitive skins" for two different robotic platforms: Leonardo, a high degree-of-freedom, sociable robot and the Huggable, a portable therapeutic robotic companion for relational, affective touch. The first step in the design of the "sensitive skin" for Leonardo: a set of hands featuring 40 force-sensing resistors (FSRs) and embedded processing was created. Somatosensory inspired algorithms for calculating the location, direction of motion, and orientation with a set of these sensors forms the first stage in the design of a "Virtual Somatosensory Cortex." A multi-modal (temperature, electric field sensors, and Quantum Tunneling Composite (QTC) based force sensors) three dimensional sensor array was created as the first step in the design of the "sensitive skin" for the Huggable. A soft silicone skin was placed over this array. Preliminary results using neural networks show that the affective content of touch can be determined. This work was sponsored in part by the NSF Center for Bits and Atoms Contract No.CCR-0122419, a Microsoft iCampus grant, and the MIT Media Lab Things That Think and Digital Life Consortia.by Walter Dan Stiehl.S.M

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

Communication is increasingly moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to ‘ways of feeling’. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally mediated touch for communication: from everyday touch-screens, tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, to the tactile internet of skin. Drawing on literature reviews, new case-study vignettes, and exemplars of digital touch, the book examines the major social debates provoked by digital touch, and investigates social themes central to the communicative potential and societal consequences of digital touch: · Communication environments, capacities and practices · Norms associations and expectations · Presence, absence and connection · Social imaginaries of digital touch · Digital touch ethics and values The book concludes with a discussion of the significance of social understanding and methods in the context of Interdisciplinary collaborations to explore touch, towards the design of digital touch communication, ‘ways of feeling’, that are useable, appropriate, ethical and socially aware

Intelligent Haptic Perception for Physical Robot Interaction

Doctorado en Ingeniería mecatrónica. Fecha de entrega de la Tesis doctoral: 8 de enero de 2020. Fecha de lectura de Tesis doctoral: 30 de marzo 2020.The dream of having robots living among us is coming true thanks to the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The gap that still exists between that dream and reality will be filled by scientific research, but manifold challenges are yet to be addressed. Handling the complexity and uncertainty of real-world scenarios is still the major challenge in robotics nowadays. In this respect, novel AI methods are giving the robots the capability to learn from experience and therefore to cope with real-life situations. Moreover, we live in a physical world in which physical interactions are both vital and natural. Thus, those robots that are being developed to live among humans must perform tasks that require physical interactions. Haptic perception, conceived as the idea of feeling and processing tactile and kinesthetic sensations, is essential for making this physical interaction possible. This research is inspired by the dream of having robots among us, and therefore, addresses the challenge of developing robots with haptic perception capabilities that can operate in real-world scenarios. This PhD thesis tackles the problems related to physical robot interaction by employing machine learning techniques. Three AI solutions are proposed for different physical robot interaction challenges: i) Grasping and manipulation of humans’ limbs; ii) Tactile object recognition; iii) Control of Variable-Stiffness-Link (VSL) manipulators. The ideas behind this research work have potential robotic applications such as search and rescue, healthcare or rehabilitation. This dissertation consists of a compendium of publications comprising as the main body a compilation of previously published scientific articles. The baseline of this research is composed of a total of five papers published in prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals and international robotics conferences