Effects of Touch Experience on Active Human Touch in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

This paper presents a strategy for building better human-robot relationships through touch. Although physical contact is an important method of communication between humans, it can produce a negative effect on relationships depending on how it is performed. For example, if one is tapped on the shoulder by another person, one may feel unpleasant unless that person is familiar. Therefore, for touch to be useful for communication, the recipient’s perception for body contact is of critical importance. However, in previous research on robot touch, the robot simply made physical contact with a person; the effects and feelings associated with this touch were not confirmed enough in these situations. Thus, we hypothesized that people must become accustomed to robot contact. Moreover, we aimed to elicit contact from people as a first step in building better human-robot relationships. To verify our hypothesis, we selected a handshake as a suitable interaction for experiment and analysis. Our results showed that an initial handshake produced a positive emotional effect in the subjects, who were then more likely to engage in further contact with the robot.