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How do People Expect Humanoids to Respond to Touch?

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Abstract

With close interaction between humans and robots expected to become more and more frequent in the near future, tactile interaction is receiving increasing interest. Many advances were made in the fields of tactile sensing and touch classification. Robot’s reactions to touches are usually decided by the robot’s designers and fit to a particular purpose. However, very little investigation has been directed to the movements that common people expect from robots being touched. This paper provides an initial step in this direction. Responses that people expect from a humanoid being touched were collected. These responses were then classified by automatically grouping similar responses. This allows the identification of distinct types of responses. Evaluation of how this grouping matches common sense were then performed. Results showed strong correlation between the automatic grouping and common sense, providing support to the idea that the automatically identified types of responses correspond to a plausible classification of robot’s responses to touch.

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Notes

  1. For the sake of completeness we notice that some touch sensors have their own plates (for example, sensor number 36 in Fig. 2), while others are placed at the corners of bigger plates (for instance sensors 70,71 and 72).

  2. A clustering analysis based on the cartesian representation can be found in the supplementary material.

  3. We note that this higher level of hierarchy in the grouping is done in a somewhat arbitrary manner by the authors, and not by the algorithm itself. For the algorithm, the classification ends up at the division into 17 clusters.

  4. Or the expert motion developer, as will be explained further later.

  5. Here and in the following, we write the English translation of the actual wordings, which was given in Japanese.

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Acknowledgments

The first author was supported by JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists. The second author was supported by the JSPS Research Activity Start-up Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Project Number 26880014.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan

    Fransiska Basoeki, Fabio DallaLibera & Hiroshi Ishiguro

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  1. Fransiska Basoeki
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  2. Fabio DallaLibera
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Correspondence to Fransiska Basoeki.

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Basoeki, F., DallaLibera, F. & Ishiguro, H. How do People Expect Humanoids to Respond to Touch?. Int J of Soc Robotics 7, 743–765 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0318-7

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