This paper presents the effect of a robot's active touch for improving people's motivation. For services in the education and healthcare fields, a robot might be useful for improving the motivation of performing such repetitive and monotonous tasks as exercising or taking medicine. Previous research demonstrated with a robot the effect of user touch on improving its impressions, but they did not clarify whether a robot's touch, especially an active touch, has enough influence on people's motive. We implemented an active touch behavior and experimentally investigated its effect on motivation. In the experiment, a robot requested participants to perform a monotonous task with a robot's active touch, a passive touch, or no touch. The result of experiment showed that an active touch by a robot increased the number of working actions and the amount of working time for the task. This suggests that a robot's active touch can support people to improve their motivation. We believe that a robot's active touch behavior is useful for such robot's services as education and healthcare.

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The RoboCup, which is a worldwide robot soccer competition, has set an ambitious goal for itself: to have a humanoid robot team win against human teams in World Cup Soccer by 2050. In order to achieve this goal, the robots require highly sophisticated sensory-data processing and decision-making functions. The development of robots for the RoboCup Humanoid League also has significant meaning for the development of robotics. However, this development is not easy and there are few papers covering it and its design policy. This paper reports the design policy for humanoids developed by Team Osaka, whose robots have been selected as the best humanoid robots four times in the last four years. In addition to the design policy, this paper also reports on the developmental process and comparisons among humanoid versions developed by Team Osaka. We believe that this paper will offer much information to other researchers who are developing humanoids for the RoboCup.