Touch-based information transfer from a robot modeled on the hearing dog

Abstract

Research on physical human-robot interaction has been attracting attention recently, focusing on robot embodiment. The work reported here proposes Active Touch Communication Robot (AcToR), a robot that is modeled on the hearing dog. A hearing dog is a type of dog assist people who are deaf or hard of hearing by alerting their handler to important sounds. AcToR uses the sense of touch to notify a human of the intention to transfer information. For example, when AcToR detects that a cell phone that is in another location has received a call, AcToR moves to the user's location and makes contact with the user's body to notify the user of the incoming call. The AcToR robot is based on the Roomba <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> and uses the Roomba's bumper and contact sensors to detect contact. This paper reports the results of psychological experiments using the AcToR robot that indicate the feasibility of using touch to transfer information from a robot to a person.