It is
interesting that when we are young we cling to our cuddly toys for comfort,
more so than humanoid toys. As we grow up, we are expected to leave those
behind and many of us substitute cuddly pets such as cats or dogs to cover their role. “Get a dog” is the advice sometimes given to the able elderly with the
explanation that it will prolong their life.
Cuddly
robots have been around for some while now with the robotic baby harp seal Paro
being the cuddliest. MIT’s Huggable, in its teddy bear guise, looks a close
second, although it has a broader function in terms of chatting and verbal
encouragement. The challenge with these robots is to make them responsive to
you just like your cat or dog manages to be.
The
trick is for the robot to sense your emotional state via the way you handle
it, say hug, stroke, tickle its ears or idly play with its fur. You see it
still has to have fur – seems to be deep in our DNA and points back to our
evolutionary origins.
To
investigate this aspect of the human-robot interaction, Yohanan and MacLean of
UBC, Vancouver, have built their Haptic Creature (HC), round, furry with big
ears and a tail (rather like a koala-sized mouse).
Covered in
a wondrous array of touch sensors, it knows when it is being hugged, stroked,
massaged, tickled or having its fur idly pulled. It breathes and purrs and has
an accelerometer so it will know if it gets kicked, but has no teeth.
Thirty
volunteers between the ages of 18 and 41 were locked away in a soundproof room
for an hour or so each with HC. Video cameras were rolling of course. They
were then encouraged to feel a range of emotional states such as pleased,
depressed, happy, and miserable in random order and their response to HC
recorded.
After
analyzing the hours of video footage and the inevitable questionnaires, HC had
been hugged, stroked, tickled and tossed up in the air with the participants
wanting it to show sympathetic responses rather than mirroring their emotions.
It appears
that HC’s back and sides were the most touched. It didn’t get its tummy tickled
very much, not like our cats and dogs. Seems nobody had the courage to tickle
the tummy of a giant mouse. Also, I’m sure that breathing and purring was
preferable to being given good advice as you might get from MIT’s Huggable.
- S. Yohanan and K.E. MacLean, Int. J. Soc. Robot. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-011-0126-7
- http://www.springerlink.com/content/543287662w312676/fulltext.pdf
