Mapping Embodied Affective Touch Strategies on a Humanoid Robot
Affective touch in human-robot interaction is shaped not only by emotional intent, but also by robot embodiment, including touch location, physical constraints, and perceived agency or social role. Existing HRI studies typically focus on one or two isolated body parts, limiting understanding of how affective touch generalises across the full humanoid body. We present a study with 32 participants interacting with the iCub robot, which is equipped with full-body distributed tactile sensors. Participants expressed eight emotions under three conditions: free touch, arm-only touch, and torso-only touch. Results show that body region and spatial constraints jointly shaped both touch location and dynamics. In free touch, participants preferred socially accessible upper-body regions, while less frequently touched areas showed stronger emotion-specific selectivity. Emotion-related variation was more evident in motion features for arm-only touch and pressure features for torso-only touch. Touch strategies also did not transfer directly between free and constrained conditions, even within the same coarse body region. Participants reported increased closeness to the robot after interaction, with around 30 percent reporting a change in perceived social relationship. Together, these findings show that affective touch expression is strongly body-region dependent and shaped by embodiment constraints.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
An affective computational model for machine consciousness
In the past, several models of consciousness have become popular and have led to the development of models for machine consciousness with varying degrees of success and challenges for simulation and implementations. More…
modelspeech-recognitionSpeech RecognitionClosing the Affective Loop: Multimodal Speaker-Listener Emotion-Dynamics-Aware Empathetic Social Robots
Empathetic social robots should respond not only to what users say, but also to how their emotions dynamically evolve during interaction. However, existing empathetic dialogue systems are often text-centered and primaril…
Response GenerationLearning Versatile Humanoid Manipulation with Touch Dreaming
Humanoid robots promise general-purpose assistance, yet real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging because it requires whole-body stability, end-effector dexterity, and contact-aware interaction under freq…
FABG : End-to-end Imitation Learning for Embodied Affective Human-Robot Interaction
This paper proposes FABG (Facial Affective Behavior Generation), an end-to-end imitation learning system for human-robot interaction, designed to generate natural and fluid facial affective behaviors. In interaction, eff…
Gesture RecognitionImitation LearningEmbracing Evolution: A Call for Body-Control Co-Design in Embodied Humanoid Robot
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily …