Design and assessment of the haptic creature's affect display

Abstract

The Haptic Creature is a small, animal-like robot we have developed to investigate the role of touch in communicating emotions between humans and robots. This paper presents a study examining how successful our robot is at communicating its emotional state through touch. Results show that, regardless of the human's gender or background with animals, the robot is effective in communicating its state of arousal but less so for valence. Also included are descriptions of the design of the Haptic Creature's emotion model and suggested improvements based on results of the study.