Haptic Intelligence

HuggieBot: A Human-Sized Haptic Interface

2022

Miscellaneous

hi


How many people have you hugged in these past two years of social distancing? Unfortunately, many people we interviewed exchanged fewer hugs with friends and family since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hugging has several health benefits, such as improved oxytocin levels, lowered blood pressure, and alleviated stress and anxiety. We created a human-sized haptic interface called HuggieBot to provide the benefits of hugs in situations when receiving a hug from another person is difficult or impossible. In this demonstration, participants of all shapes and sizes can walk up to HuggieBot, enter an embrace, perform several intra-hug gestures (hold still, rub, pat, or squeeze the robot) if desired, feel the robot's response, and leave the hug when they are ready.

Author(s): Alexis E. Block and Hasti Seifi and Sammy Christen and Bernard Javot and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
Year: 2022
Month: May

Department(s): Haptic Intelligence
Research Project(s): HuggieBot: Evolution of an Interactive Hugging Robot with Visual and Haptic Perception
Bibtex Type: Miscellaneous (misc)
Paper Type: Demonstration

Address: Hamburg, Germany
How Published: Hands-on demonstration presented at EuroHaptics
Note: Award for best hands-on demonstration
State: Published

BibTex

@misc{Block22-EHD-Interface,
  title = {Huggie{B}ot: A Human-Sized Haptic Interface},
  author = {Block, Alexis E. and Seifi, Hasti and Christen, Sammy and Javot, Bernard and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  howpublished = {Hands-on demonstration presented at EuroHaptics},
  address = {Hamburg, Germany},
  month = may,
  year = {2022},
  note = {Award for best hands-on demonstration},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {5}
}