Högskolan i Skövde

Robotic technology is quickly advancing and robots are entering both professional and domestic settings. An increased application of robots in elderly care and in therapy shows a shift towards social robots acting in human environments, designed to socially interact with humans. Socially interactive robots need to act in relation to social and emotional aspects of human life, and be able to sense and react to social cues. Touch, as one of the most fundamental aspects of human social interaction (Montagu, 1986) has lately received great interest in human-robot interaction (HRI) research (e.g. Dahiya et al., 2010; Silvera-Tawil et al., 2015) and the interpretation of touch in robotics has been presented as an unresolved research area with a crucial role in further development of HRI (Silvera-Tawil et al., 2015). It has been argued that the communicative distance between people and robots would be shortened and that the interaction would be more meaningful and intuitive if robots were able to “feel”, “understand”, and respond to touch in accordance with expectations of the human (Silvera-Tawil et al., 2015). However, this reasoning takes the notion of user experience (UX) for granted. The concept of UX embraces both pragmatic and hedonic aspects of interaction with technology in a particular context (Hartson & Pyla, 2012). In the field of human-computer interaction, UX has been acknowledged as a key term in the design of interactive products, but UX has not been emphasized in HRI. Accordingly, this research argues that it is important to study not only the robotic technology aspect of tactile interaction but also the user’s experience of the interaction, i.e. taking on the human-centered HRI approach presented by Dautenhahn (2007). Research on human-human interaction has showed that humans are able to communicate emotions via touch, and that specific emotions are associated with specific touch behaviors (Hertenstein et al., 2009). As a starting point for narrowing the distance between UX and HRI, the present research suggests a study where subjects are instructed to convey specific emotions to a humanoid robot. The study aims at investigating the role of affective touch in HRI with a focus on touch behaviors (e.g. stroking, grasping) for specific emotions, touch locations on the robot, and user experience of interacting with the robot via touch. The intended contributions of this study are an increased understanding of the necessary properties of tactile sensors enabling affective touch in human-robot interaction, the relevant placements of the sensors on the robot, and how the robot’s “look and feel” affects the user’s experience of the interaction. The proposed research embarks on a new track of HRI research and will, contrary to prior research on tactile interaction in HRI, emphasize the user experience of affective touch, highlighting that a positive user experience has to be systematically and consciously designed in order for the social robots to achieve the intended benefits of being socially interactive. Accordingly, the proposed study is believed to give new insights about the understudied dimension of UX in HRI, with the potential to enrich interaction between humans and social robots.