Forming Intimate Human-Robot Relationships Through A Kissing Machine

Robots are increasingly becoming involved in people's lives as social companions or even romantic partners rather than mere productivity tools. To facilitate intimacy in human-robot relationships, technologies should enable human to have intimate physical interactions with robots, such as kissing. This paper presents a kissing machine that reproduces and transmits the haptic sensations of kissing. It provides a physical interface for human to form emotional and intimate connections with robots or virtual characters through kissing, and also acts as a remote agent for human to transmit kisses remotely through a communication network.