Conveying Emotions by Touch to the Nao Robot: A User Experience Perspective (original) (raw)
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Affective Touch in Human–Robot Interaction: Conveying Emotion to the Nao Robot
International Journal of Social Robotics
Affective touch has a fundamental role in human development, social bonding, and for providing emotional support in interpersonal relationships. We present, what is to our knowledge, the first HRI study of tactile conveyance of both positive and negative emotions (affective touch) on the Nao robot, and based on an experimental setup from a study of human-human tactile communication. In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to a small humanoid robot via touch. We found that female participants conveyed emotions for a longer time, using more varied interaction and touching more regions on the robot's body, compared to male participants. Several differences between emotions were found such that emotions could be classified by the valence of the emotion conveyed, by combining touch amount and duration. Overall, these results show high agreement with those reported for human-human affective tactile communication and could also have impact on the design and placement of tactile sensors on humanoid robots.
Multimodal Technologies and Interaction
We here present results and analysis from a study of affective tactile communication between human and humanoid robot (the NAO robot). In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to the NAO via touch. In this study, we sought to understand the potential for using a wearable affective (tactile) interface, or WAffI. The aims of our study were to address the following: (i) how emotions and affective states can be conveyed (encoded) to such a humanoid robot, (ii) what are the effects of dressing the NAO in the WAffI on emotion conveyance and (iii) what is the potential for decoding emotion and affective states. We found that subjects conveyed touch for longer duration and over more locations on the robot when the NAO was dressed with WAffI than when it was not. Our analysis illuminates ways by which affective valence, and separate emotions, might be decoded by a humanoid robot according to the different features of touch: intensity, duration, location, type. Finally, we discuss the types of sensors and their distribution as they may be embedded within the WAffI and that would likely benefit Human-NAO (and Human-Humanoid) interaction along the affective tactile dimension.
User experience of conveying emotions by touch
2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2017
In the present study, 64 users were asked to convey eight distinct emotion to a humanoid Nao robot via touch, and were then asked to evaluate their experiences of performing that task. Large differences between emotions were revealed. Users perceived conveying of positive/pro-social emotions as significantly easier than negative emotions, with love and disgust as the two extremes. When asked whether they would act differently towards a human, compared to the robot, the users' replies varied. A content analysis of interviews revealed a generally positive user experience (UX) while interacting with the robot, but users also found the task challenging in several ways. Three major themes with impact on the UX emerged; responsiveness, robustness, and trickiness. The results are discussed in relation to a study of human-human affective tactile interaction, with implications for human-robot interaction (HRI) and design of social and affective robotics in particular.
Social robotics asks people to be physically and psychologically intimate with robots. Of all the senses, touch is most associated with intimacy and the material qualities of contact readily morph into psychological ones. To see how these intricacies of touch are present but not always fully articulated in research into tactility in social robots, this paper firstly considers two sets of research in tactile robotics, one examining touch in an anthropomorphic robot and the other in an innovative, partially zoomorphic robot. While such research can be criticised for functionalising and quantifying touch, this is not an exhaustive understanding of the incorporation of affective touch in social robotics. Alongside functional and quantifying processes (and not necessarily in opposition to them) are novel and rich imaginative ones, often driven by low-tech materials. These dimensions of affective touch are more often articulated in discussions of robotic, cinematic, tactile and media art that consider the perceptual style of touch to be multivalent, imaginative and mobile. This perspective can contribute to articulating the dynamics of affective touch in social robotics, allowing for the recognition of the importance of the low-tech, material features that are a noteworthy part of touching robots. The ambiguities and indeterminacies of affective touch, messy materialism and the interactivity of affect interweave with high-tech computational practices in generating the experience of touching social robots.
Tactile Affect and Human-Robot Intimacy in Japan
Consumer Culture Theory in Asia: History and Current Issues, edited by Russell Belk and Yuko Minowa. London and New York: Routledge. , 2022
Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and emotion for use in mass-produced social robots. Robot producers and marketers reason that such robot companions can provide comfort, healing (iyashi), and intimacy in light of attenuating social bonds and increased socioeconomic stress characteristic of Japanese society since the collapse of the country’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. While many of these robots with so-called “artificial emotional intelligence” are equipped with rudimentary capacities to “read” predefined human emotion through such mechanisms as facial expression recognition, a new category of companion robots are more experimental. These robots do not interpret human emotion through affect-sensing software but rather invite human-robot interaction through affectively pleasing forms of haptic feedback. These new robots are called haptic creatures: robot companions designed to deliver a sense of comforting presence through a combination of animated movements and healing touch. Integrating historical analysis with ethnographic interviews with new users of these robots, and focusing in particular on the cat-like cushion robot Qoobo, this chapter argues that while companion robots are designed in part to understand specific human emotions, haptic creatures are created as experimental devices that can generate new and unexpected pleasures of affective care unique to human-robot relationships. It suggests that this distinction is critical for understanding and evaluating how corporations seek to use human-robot affect as a means to deliver care to consumers while also researching and building new markets for profit maximization.
Social robots and the futures of affective touch
The Senses and Society, 2023
I focus on the role of touch within human-robot interaction. Because robots are physically embodied, this brings up questions of anthropomorphism and behavioral mimicry in the establishment of trust and rapport, especially between robots and developmentally diverse or elderly human subjects. By examining two recent examples of social robots, SoCoRo and HuggieBot 2.0, I ask: what can historic and current nonverbal communication studies teach us about haptic protocols and motor mimicry? How are touching behaviors fostering prosocial behaviors, and what potential is there for using robotic platforms as experimental laboratories to investigate the futures of touching?
User Experience in Social Human-Robot Interaction
International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence, 2017
Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people's lives, it is of major importance to stress the need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between humans and robots. However, a positive UX does not appear by itself but has to be designed for and evaluated systematically. In this paper, the focus is on the role and relevance of UX in human-robot interaction (HRI) and four trends concerning the role and relevance of UX related to socially interactive robots are identified, and three challenges related to its evaluation are also presented. It is argued that current research efforts and directions are not sufficient in HRI research, and that future research needs to further address interdisciplinary research in order to achieve long-term success of socially interactive robots.
What Kinds of Robot's Touch Will Match Expressed Emotions?
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2019
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.
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2011
Affective touch is a crucial element of early human development, social bonding, and emotional support. Technically and socially difficult to study, it has received little research attention. Our approach employs animal models instantiated by the Haptic Creature, a touch-centric social robot. In this paper, we examine how humans communicate emotional state through touch to the Haptic Creature and their expectations of its reactions. A user study is presented where participants selected and performed gestures they would likely use when conveying nine different emotions to the Haptic Creature. We report a touch dictionary compiled for our research; the gestures participants chose from it; and video analysis of their enactment. Our principal findings regard patterns of gesture use for emotional expression; physical properties of the likely gestures; expectations for the Haptic Creature's response to mirror the emotion communicated; and analysis of the human's higher intent in communication. From the latter finding, we present five tentative categories of "intent" that overlap emotion states: protective, comforting, restful, affectionate, and playful. These results can help inform the future design of social robots by illuminating details of one direction in affective touch interactions.
Getting in Touch: How imagined, actual, and physical contact affect evaluations of robots
2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2016
Although it is widely accepted that robots will be used in everyday contexts in near future, many people feel anxious and hold negative attitudes toward robots. This negative reaction might be stronger when users come into direct physical contact with them, particularly when touch is required between robots and humans, (e.g., when using robots as assistants to help elderly people at home). Intergroup contact research in social psychology has proposed various forms of contact as a means to reduce negative feelings toward outgroup members. The present study examined how Contact Type (Actual vs. Imagined) and Contact Modality (Look vs. Touch) with a NAO robot would impact attitudes toward NAO compared to a no-contact control condition. Results showed that nearly any type of contact effectively reduced negative emotions compared to the control condition. However, for participants with preexisting negative emotions toward robots, contact sometimes produced more negative attitudes. We discuss these findings and the resulting implications for future research.