Tactile Interaction and Social Touch: Classifying Human Touch Using a Soft Tactile Sensor

This paper presents an ongoing study on affective human-robot interaction. In our previous research, touch type is shown to be informative for communicated emotion. Here, a soft matrix array sensor is used to capture the tactile interaction between human and robot and 6 machine learning methods including CNN, RNN and C3D are implemented to classify different touch types, constituting a pre-stage to recognizing emotional tactile interaction. Results show an average recognition rate of 95% by C3D for classified touch types, which provide stable classification results for developing social touch technology.