Affective Touch Robots with Changing Textures and Movements

We explore how to design emotional expression using tabletop social robots with multiple texture modules. Previous studies in human-robot interaction have presented various designs for emotionally expressive robots without using anthropomorphic forms or cues. They revealed that haptic stimulation based on the textures and movements of the robots could evoke some emotions in users, although these were limited. In this work, we propose using a combination of textures and movements for richer emotional expression. We implemented tabletop robots equipped with detachable texture modules made of five different materials (plastic resin, aluminum, clay, Velcro, and cotton) and performed a user study with 13 participants to investigate how they would map the combinations of textures and movements to nine emotions chosen from Russell’s circumplex model. The results indicated that the robots could express various emotions such as excited, happy, calm, and sad. Deeper analysis of these results revealed some interesting relationships between emotional valence/arousal and texture/movement: for example, cold texture played an important role in expressing negative valence, and controlling the frequency of the movements could change the expression of arousal.