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Observing Robot Touch in Context: How Does Touch and Attitude Affect Perceptions of a Robot's Social Qualities?

Published: 26 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The complex role of touch is an increasingly appreciated horizon for HRI research. The explicit and implicit registers of touch, both human-to-robot and robot-to-human, have opened up pressing questions in design and HRI ethics about embodiment, communication, care, and human affection. In this paper we present results of an MTurk survey about robot-initiated touch in a social context. We examine how a positive or negative attitude from the robot, as well as whether the robot touches an interactant, affects how a robot is judged as a worker and teammate. Our findings confirm previous empirical support for the idea of touch as enhancing social appraisals of a robot, though the extent of that positive tactile role was complicated and tempered by the survey responses» gender effects.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HRI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
    February 2018
    468 pages
    ISBN:9781450349536
    DOI:10.1145/3171221
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 26 February 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. gender effects
    2. observation study
    3. robot touch

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    HRI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 49 of 206 submissions, 24%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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