Abstract
Although before-touch situations are essential to achieve natural touch interactions between people and robots, they receive less attention than after-touch situations. This study reports pre-touch reaction distance analysis results around touchable upper body parts, i.e., shoulders, elbows, and hands, based on human–human pre-touch interaction. We also analyzed the effects of gender, approach side, speed, and acclimation in modeling the pre-touch reaction distance, and found that the distance around the hands is smaller than the distance around the shoulders and elbows, and speed and acclimation affect the distance. On the other hand, gender and approach side do not significantly affect the pre-touch reaction distance. Finally, we implemented the results in a male-looking android and confirmed that it reacted toward pre-touch based on the obtained model.
Highlights
IntroductionTouch interaction with other people provides various positive effects [1,2,3,4,5,6], but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, such interaction is physically and socially limited in the world
The total number of touching data was different between participants because of varied pre-touch number of touching data was different between participants because of varied pre-touch reaction distances, approaching speeds, etc
This study investigated and modeled the pre-touch reaction distance around socially touchable upper body parts, based on human–human pre-touch interaction observations
Summary
Touch interaction with other people provides various positive effects [1,2,3,4,5,6], but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, such interaction is physically and socially limited in the world. In this context, using social robots as a partner of touch interaction is a promising approach to cover the lack of human–human touch interaction since past studies reported several positive effects of such interaction [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Based on human science literature, a part of the upper body (i.e., the shoulders or arms, including elbow and hands) is mainly used in touch interaction with others [18]
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