What Kinds of Robot's Touch Will Match Expressed Emotions?

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of touch characteristics that change the strength and the naturalness of the emotions perceived by people in human-robot touch interaction with an android robot that has a feminine, human-like appearance. Past studies on human-robot touch interaction focused on understanding what kinds of human touches conveyed emotion to robots, i.e., the robot's touch characteristics that can affect people's perceived emotions received less focus. In this study, we concentrated on three touch characteristics (length, type, and part) based on arousal/valence perspectives, and their effects on the perceived strength/naturalness of a commonly used emotion in human-robot interaction, i.e., happiness, and its counterpart emotion, (i.e., sadness), borrowing Ekman's definitions. Our results showed that the touch length and its type are useful to change the perceived strengths and the naturalness of the expressed emotions based on the arousal/valence perspective, although the touch part did not fit such perspective assumptions. Finally, our results suggest that a brief pat and a longer contact by the fingers are better combinations to express happy and sad emotions with our robot. Since we only used a female android, we discussed future works with a male humanoid robot and/or a robot whose appearance is less humanoid.Index Terms-Human-robot interaction, touch interaction. I. INTRODUCTIONT OUCH is an essential factor in emotional communication for human beings in conjunction with facial expressions and language. Various human science literatures have revealed how touch interactions are used between people [1]-[3] and how touch shapes emotions [4]-[6]. The positive and negative effects of touch interactions have also been broadly investigated, for instance, its importance for human well-being [7]-[9]. To understand the relationship between touch and conveyed emotions, Hertenstein et al. conducted a data collection with touch-type and touched-part and different emotions (Ekman's emotions Manuscript

Survey of Emotions in Human–Robot Interactions: Perspectives from Robotic Psychology on 20 Years of Research

“…The reviewed studies in this research stream mostly take place in single countries, which span most of the world, including Korea [136,138,202], Japan [128][129][130]147,188,192,193,196,253,286], India [255], and China [223,243,301] in Asia. France [5,6,43], the Netherlands [91,92,230,258,283,284], Finland [102], Germany [195,233,264], Italy [17], Spain [89], Sweden [7], and the United Kingdom [28,38,146,157,213,279] in Europe; as well as the United States [27,49,50,93,115,119,142,145,153,159,165,…”

“…Disciplines: Most of the studies have their origins in the field of robotics [5,6,43,115,138,145,179,196,202,223,283,284,301], human-computer interaction [38, 93,111,128,129,230], or HRI [27,49,50,91,92,113,114,136,146,157,159,165,188,195,213,218,221,243,255,258,279]. Emotional reactions to HRI also have attracted considerations of social interactions, as detailed in research into behavioral robotics [28], cognitive science [102], ergonomics [119], social robotics [142,147,192], and psychology [253].…”

Modeling the Timing and Duration of Grip Behavior to Express Emotions for a Social Robot

“…Similar to past studies that investigated human-robot touch interaction in the context of emotion expressions [23,24], we need a robot that can express various touch behaviors and has a human-like appearance. We used ERICA [2], a feminine appearance android that has ten degrees of freedom (DOF) for her each arm.…”

“…Digital Object Identifier (DOI): see top of this page interaction in the context of well-being [16][17][18], as well as both mental and physical benefits [19][20][21][22]. Although past studies focused on using touch interaction mixed with facial expressions and voices, recent robots can express happy/sad emotions more strongly and naturally by considering touch characteristics to express intimacy [23,24]. Therefore, understanding touch characteristics to express emotions would be helpful for the behavior designs of social robots to realize more natural and acceptable affective interaction with people.…”

“…However, even though these past studies investigated the effectiveness of such touch characteristics as type, length, and place [23,24], it remains unknown when a robot should touch a person to express its emotions appropriately. A few studies conducted experiments that involved touch interaction where participants watched movies with robots.…”