The Haptic Creature
Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

The Haptic Creature. (Photo: Martin Dee)

Abstract

Emotion communication is an important aspect of social interaction. Affect display research from psychology as well as social human-robot interaction has focused primarily on facial or vocal behaviors, as these are the predominant means of expression for humans. Much less attention, however, has been on emotion communication through touch, which, though unique among the senses, can be methodologically and technologically difficult to study.

Our thesis investigated the role of affective touch in the social interaction between human and robot. Through a process of design and controlled user evaluation, we examined the display, recognition, and emotional influence of affective touch. To mitigate issues inherent in touch research, we drew from interaction models not between humans but between human and animal, whereby the robot assumes the role of companion animal.

We developed the Haptic Creature, a small, zoomorphic robot novel in its sole focus on touch for both affect sensing and display. The robot perceives movement and touch, and it expresses emotions through ear stiffness, modulated breathing, and vibrotactile purring. The Haptic Creature was employed in three user studies, each exploring a different aspect of affective touch interaction.

Our first study examined emotion display from the robot. We detail the design of the Haptic Creature's affect display, which originated from animal models, then was enhanced through successive piloting. A formal study demonstrated the robot was more successful communicating arousal than valence.

Our second study investigated affect display from the human. We compiled a touch dictionary from psychology and human-animal interaction research. Participants first rated the likelihood of using these touch gestures when expressing a variety of emotions, then performed likely gestures communicating specific emotions for the Haptic Creature. Results provided properties of human affect display through touch and high-level categorization of intent.

Our final study explored the influence of affective touch. Results empirically demonstrated the human's emotional state was directly influenced from affective touch interactions with the robot.

Our research has direct significance to the field of socially interactive robotics and, further, any domain interested in human use of affective touch: psychology, mediated social touch, human-animal interaction.

Publications

Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2012). The Role of Affective Touch in Human-Robot Interaction: Human Intent and Expectations in Touching the Haptic Creature. In International Journal of Social Robotics (SORO) – Special Issue on Expectations, Intentions & Actions, volume 4, number 2, pages 163-180, April 2012.
[doi: 10.1007/s12369-011-0126-7]

Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2011). Design and Assessment of the Haptic Creature's Affect Display. In HRI '11: Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pages 473-480, Lausanne, Switzerland, March 6-9 2011. (Best Paper Award: “Most Interesting Interaction”).
[doi: 10.1145/1957656.1957820]

Jonathan Chang, Karon MacLean, and Steve Yohanan (2010). Gesture Recognition in the Haptic Creature. In Proceedings of EuroHaptics 2010, pages 385-391, Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 8-10 2010.
[doi:10.1007/978-3-642-14064-8_56]

Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2009). A Tool to Study Affective Touch: Goals & Design of the Haptic Creature. In CHI '09: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 4153-4158, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, April 4-9 2009.
[doi:10.1145/1520340.1520632]

Steve Yohanan and Karon E. MacLean (2008). The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch. In Proceedings of the AISB 2008 Symposium on the Reign of Catz & Dogz: The Second AISB Symposium on the Role of Virtual Creatures in a Computerised Society, volume 1, pages 7-11, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, April 1-4 2008. (Best Paper Nominee).

Steve Yohanan, Mavis Chan, Jeremy Hopkins, Haibo Sun, and Karon MacLean (2005). Hapticat: Exploration of Affective Touch. In ICMI '05: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, pages 222-229, Trento, Italy, October 4-6 2005.
[doi:10.1145/1088463.1088502]