![]() Simultaneously, the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR) continues to grow, with robots serving as assistants ( Kim et al., 2013 Fitter et al., 2020), caregivers ( Bilyea et al., 2017 Ferretti et al., 2018 Logan et al., 2019), and companions ( Shibata and Wada, 2011 Jeong et al., 2015 Sefidgar et al., 2015). Affective touch, or touch with an emotional component, is used to convey our emotions to others through nonverbal communication, such as a hug. Touch promotes social bonding and cognitive development in children ( Cascio et al., 2019) and is essential for emotional well-being ( Harlow and Zimmermann, 1959). We touch other people to gain attention, communicate needs, and build empathy and attachment ( Cascio et al., 2012 Van Erp and Toet, 2015). Social touch is an integral aspect of our daily interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. Our promising results show that this type of tactile-perception system can detect necessary social-touch communication cues from users, can be tailored to a variety of robot body parts, and can provide HRI researchers with the tools needed to implement social touch in their own systems. ![]() Participants rated the sensor-equipped arm as pleasant to touch and liked the robot’s presence significantly more after touch interactions. After training, a gesture-classification algorithm based on a random forest identified the correct combined touch gesture and force intensity on windows of held-out test data with an average accuracy of 74.1%, which is more than eight times better than chance. Fifteen adults then performed five types of affective touch-communication gestures (hitting, poking, squeezing, stroking, and tickling) at two force intensities (gentle and energetic) on the four sensor locations we share this dataset of four time-varying resistances, our sensor patterns, and a characterization of the sensors’ physical performance. We installed four of our fabric-and-foam-based resistive sensors on the curved surfaces of a NAO’s left arm, including its hand, lower arm, upper arm, and shoulder. This paper presents a low-cost, easy-to-build, soft tactile-perception system that we created for the NAO robot, as well as participants’ feedback on touching this system. This practical approach can enable researchers and caregivers to continue to use robotic technology they have already purchased and learned about, but with a myriad of new social-touch interactions possible. Rather than build entirely new robotic systems, we propose to augment existing rigid-bodied robots with an external touch-perception system. ![]() Social touch is essential to everyday interactions, but current socially assistive robots have limited touch-perception capabilities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |