Mapping Embodied Affective Touch Strategies on a Humanoid Robot

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11825v1
• Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 09:13:10 GMT
• Title: Mapping Embodied Affective Touch Strategies on a Humanoid Robot
• Abstract summary: We present a study with 32 participants interacting with the iCub robot.<n>Results show that body region and spatial constraints jointly shaped both touch location and dynamics.
• Score: 37.805714617687244
• License: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
• Abstract: Affective touch in human-robot interaction is shaped not only by emotional intent, but also by robot embodiment, including touch location, physical constraints, and perceived agency or social role. Existing HRI studies typically focus on one or two isolated body parts, limiting understanding of how affective touch generalises across the full humanoid body. We present a study with 32 participants interacting with the iCub robot, which is equipped with full-body distributed tactile sensors. Participants expressed eight emotions under three conditions: free touch, arm-only touch, and torso-only touch. Results show that body region and spatial constraints jointly shaped both touch location and dynamics. In free touch, participants preferred socially accessible upper-body regions, while less frequently touched areas showed stronger emotion-specific selectivity. Emotion-related variation was more evident in motion features for arm-only touch and pressure features for torso-only touch. Touch strategies also did not transfer directly between free and constrained conditions, even within the same coarse body region. Participants reported increased closeness to the robot after interaction, with around 30 percent reporting a change in perceived social relationship. Together, these findings show that affective touch expression is strongly body-region dependent and shaped by embodiment constraints.

Related papers

• Design and Human Evaluation of Tactile Withdrawal Reflexes for a Skin-Covered Robot Arm [3.0386584727208032]
  Nociception is a protective biological mechanism that links harmful stimulation to a reaction.<n>We present a complete pipeline that maps pressure changes from sensitive skin on a robot manipulator to bio-inspired withdrawal motions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-24T12:31:44Z)
• Designing Touch for Trauma-Informed Social Robots: A Design Space for Direct and Indirect Actuation [0.0]
  Design of touch-based interactions for individuals with PTSD requires careful consideration of trauma-informed care principles.<n>This paper investigates how touch actuation in social robots can be designed to align with trauma-informed care.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-06T12:17:40Z)
• Tactile-Proprioceptive Sensor Fusion for Contact Wrench Estimation in Whole-Body Physical Human-Robot Interaction [6.839826083147316]
  This paper presents a tactile-proprioceptive sensor fusion framework for natural physical human-robot interaction.<n>Tactile cues from pneumatic skin pads serve as contact indicators that bypass the ambiguity between frictional residues and applied external forces.<n>We fuse these cues with motor-current-based proprioception to reconstruct multi-axis contact forces on the robot surface.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-27T12:47:25Z)
• XR$^3$: An Extended Reality Platform for Social-Physical Human-Robot Interaction [7.5509967369489965]
  We present XR$3$, a co-located operator and a hidden dual-VR-headset platform for HRI research.<n>The robot's upper-body motion, head and gaze behavior, and facial expressions are mapped from the operator's tracked limbs and face signals.<n>We detail the system design and calibration, and demonstrate the platform in a touch-based Wizard-of-Oz study.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-18T13:11:41Z)
• Design and Integration of Thermal and Vibrotactile Feedback for Lifelike Touch in Social Robots [6.020834060631049]
  Zoomorphic Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) offer an alternative source of social touch for individuals who cannot access animal companionship.<n>We present a multimodal tactile prototype, which was used to augment the established PARO robot.<n>A flexible heating interface delivers body-like warmth, while embedded actuators generate heartbeat-like rhythms and continuous purring sensations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-19T19:52:44Z)
• CAST-Phys: Contactless Affective States Through Physiological signals Database [74.28082880875368]
  The lack of affective multi-modal datasets remains a major bottleneck in developing accurate emotion recognition systems.<n>We present the Contactless Affective States Through Physiological Signals Database (CAST-Phys), a novel high-quality dataset capable of remote physiological emotion recognition.<n>Our analysis highlights the crucial role of physiological signals in realistic scenarios where facial expressions alone may not provide sufficient emotional information.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-07-08T15:20:24Z)
• Touch and Tell: Multimodal Decoding of Human Emotions and Social Gestures for Robots [4.072544789256895]
  Human emotions are complex and can be conveyed through nuanced touch gestures.<n>Previous research has primarily focused on how humans recognize emotions through touch or on identifying key features of emotional expression for robots.<n>This study investigates the consistency and distinguishability of emotional and gestural expressions through touch and sound.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-04T13:17:42Z)
• ReMoS: 3D Motion-Conditioned Reaction Synthesis for Two-Person Interactions [66.87211993793807]
  We present ReMoS, a denoising diffusion based model that synthesizes full body motion of a person in two person interaction scenario. We demonstrate ReMoS across challenging two person scenarios such as pair dancing, Ninjutsu, kickboxing, and acrobatics. We also contribute the ReMoCap dataset for two person interactions containing full body and finger motions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-28T18:59:52Z)
• See, Hear, and Feel: Smart Sensory Fusion for Robotic Manipulation [49.925499720323806]
  We study how visual, auditory, and tactile perception can jointly help robots to solve complex manipulation tasks. We build a robot system that can see with a camera, hear with a contact microphone, and feel with a vision-based tactile sensor.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-12-07T18:55:53Z)
• Data-driven emotional body language generation for social robotics [58.88028813371423]
  In social robotics, endowing humanoid robots with the ability to generate bodily expressions of affect can improve human-robot interaction and collaboration. We implement a deep learning data-driven framework that learns from a few hand-designed robotic bodily expressions. The evaluation study found that the anthropomorphism and animacy of the generated expressions are not perceived differently from the hand-designed ones.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-05-02T09:21:39Z)
• Multi-Cue Adaptive Emotion Recognition Network [4.570705738465714]
  We propose a new deep learning approach for emotion recognition based on adaptive multi-cues. We compare the proposed approach with the state-of-art approaches in the CAER-S dataset.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-03T15:08:55Z)
• Elastic Tactile Simulation Towards Tactile-Visual Perception [58.44106915440858]
  We propose Elastic Interaction of Particles (EIP) for tactile simulation. EIP models the tactile sensor as a group of coordinated particles, and the elastic property is applied to regulate the deformation of particles during contact. We further propose a tactile-visual perception network that enables information fusion between tactile data and visual images.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-08-11T03:49:59Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.