Physical and Behavioral Factors Improve Robot Hug Quality

2017

Miscellaneous

hi

A hug is one of the most basic ways humans can express affection. As hugs are so common, a natural progression of robot development is to have robots one day hug humans as seamlessly as these intimate human-human interactions occur. This project’s purpose is to evaluate human responses to different robot physical characteristics and hugging behaviors. Specifically, we aim to test the hypothesis that a warm, soft, touch-sensitive PR2 humanoid robot can provide humans with satisfying hugs by matching both their hugging pressure and their hugging duration. Thirty participants experienced and evaluated twelve hugs with the robot, divided into three randomly ordered trials that focused on physical robot char- acteristics and nine randomly ordered trials with varied hug pressure and duration. We found that people prefer soft, warm hugs over hard, cold hugs. Furthermore, users prefer hugs that physically squeeze them and release immediately when they are ready for the hug to end.

@misc{Block17-ROMANWS-Quality,
  title = {Physical and Behavioral Factors Improve Robot Hug Quality},
  author = {Block, Alexis E. and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  howpublished = {Workshop Paper (2 pages) presented at the RO-MAN Workshop on Social Interaction and Multimodal Expression for Socially Intelligent Robots},
  address = {Lisbon, Portugal},
  month = aug,
  year = {2017},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {8}
}