Abstract
Affective touch has a fundamental role in human development, social bonding, and for providing emotional support in interpersonal relationships. We present, what is to our knowledge, the first HRI study of tactile conveyance of both positive and negative emotions (affective touch) on the Nao robot, and based on an experimental set-up from a study of human–human tactile communication. In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to a small humanoid robot via touch. We found that female participants conveyed emotions for a longer time, using more varied interaction and touching more regions on the robot’s body, compared to male participants. Several differences between emotions were found such that emotions could be classified by the valence of the emotion conveyed, by combining touch amount and duration. Overall, these results show high agreement with those reported for human–human affective tactile communication and could also have impact on the design and placement of tactile sensors on humanoid robots.
Highlights
This paper reports on a study of how humans convey emotions via touch to a social humanoid robot, in this case the Nao robot
As a foundation for this study, we have, as far as possible, replicated a human–human interaction (HHI) experiment conducted by Hertenstein et al [25] so as to validate our work within the context of natural tactile interaction
It should be borne in mind that, unlike for Hertenstein et al [25] experiments, the Nao robot is not able to decode the emotions being conveyed by the humans; we did not have an a priori measure of successful decoding of the emotions
Summary
This paper reports on a study of how humans convey emotions via touch to a social humanoid robot, in this case the Nao robot. As a foundation for this study, we have, as far as possible, replicated a human–human interaction (HHI) experiment conducted by Hertenstein et al [25] so as to validate our work within the context of natural tactile interaction. This paper reports on a study of how humans convey emotions via touch to a social humanoid robot, in this case the Nao robot.. As a foundation for this study, we have, as far as possible, replicated a human–human interaction (HHI) experiment conducted by Hertenstein et al [25] so as to validate our work within the context of natural tactile interaction. The purpose of our work is twofold: (a) systems design based: to inform future development efforts of tactile sensors, con- The application of robots in different social domains, e.g. for teaching, companionship, assistive living, may predominantly affect one gender or other and, we consider analysis of affective tactile interaction between genders of critical importance to HRI
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