Wearable partner agent with anthropomorphic physical contact with awareness of user's clothing and posture

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a wearable partner agent, that makes physical contacts corresponding to the user's clothing, posture, and detected contexts. Physical contacts are generated by combining haptic stimuli and anthropomorphic motions of the agent. The agent performs two types of the behaviors: a) it notifies the user of a message by patting the user's arm and b) it generates emotional expression by strongly enfolding the user's arm. Our experimental results demonstrated that haptic communication from the agent increases the intelligibility of the agent's messages and familiar impressions of the agent.