A survey of Tactile Human–Robot Interactions
---
paper_title: A Survey of Robot Tactile Sensing Technology

paper_content:

This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art in tactile sens ing technology. We examine in detail the different methods of transduction employed by tactile sensors and describe various significant designs that incorporate these methods. We then describe the different techniques used to process and analyze tactile data. Finally, we conclude with an assessment of the current state of development.
---
paper_title: Tactile Sensing—From Humans to Humanoids

paper_content:

Starting from human ?sense of touch,? this paper reviews the state of tactile sensing in robotics. The physiology, coding, and transferring tactile data and perceptual importance of the ?sense of touch? in humans are discussed. Following this, a number of design hints derived for robotic tactile sensing are presented. Various technologies and transduction methods used to improve the touch sense capability of robots are presented. Tactile sensing, focused to fingertips and hands until past decade or so, has now been extended to whole body, even though many issues remain open. Trend and methods to develop tactile sensing arrays for various body sites are presented. Finally, various system issues that keep tactile sensing away from widespread utility are discussed.
---
paper_title: Tactile sensing and control of robotic manipulation

paper_content:

—This paper reviews the current state of the art and predicts the outlook in robotic tactile sensing for real-time control of dextrous manipulation. We begin with an overview of human touch sensing capabilities and draw lessons for robotic manipulation. Next, tactile sensor devices are described, including tactile array sensors, force-torque sensors, and dynamic tactile sensors. The information provided by these devices can be used in manipulation in many ways, such as finding contact locations and object shape, measuring contact forces, and determining contact conditions. Finally, recent progress in experimental use of tactile sensing in manipulation is discussed, and future directions for research in sensing and control are considered.
---
paper_title: Common metrics for human-robot interaction

paper_content:

This paper describes an effort to identify common metrics for task-oriented human-robot interaction (HRI). We begin by discussing the need for a toolkit of HRI metrics. We then describe the framework of our work and identify important biasing factors that must be taken into consideration. Finally, we present suggested common metrics for standardization and a case study. Preparation of a larger, more detailed toolkit is in progress.
---
paper_title: Theory and evaluation of human robot interactions

paper_content:

Human-robot interaction (HRI) for mobile robots is still in its infancy. Most user interactions with robots have been limited to tele-operation capabilities where the most common interface provided to the user has been the video feed from the robotic platform and some way of directing the path of the robot. For mobile robots with semiautonomous capabilities, the user is also provided with a means of setting way points. More importantly, most HRI capabilities have been developed by robotics experts for use by robotics experts. As robots increase in capabilities and are able to perform more tasks in an autonomous manner we need to think about the interactions that humans will have with robots and what software architecture and user interface designs can accommodate the human in-the-loop. We also need to design systems that can be used by domain experts but not robotics experts. This paper outlines a theory of human-robot interaction and proposes the interactions and information needed by both humans and robots for the different levels of interaction, including an evaluation methodology based on situational awareness.
---
paper_title: A quantitative technique for analysing robot-human interactions

paper_content:

This paper proposes a technique for quantitatively describing and analysing robot-human interactions in terms of low-level behavioural criteria (so-called micro-behaviours). In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this technique, we describe a case study that was conducted as part of the Aurora project where we develop robotic toys as therapeutic tools for children with autism. In this project we made explicit choices of how to assess robot-human interaction and how to study the impact of interaction. Results of a comparative study with autistic children are shown where we focus on eye gaze behaviour. The results point out common tendencies as well as clear differences among the children, important information for future development of robots in the Aurora project. We propose that this technique is applicable to a wide range of application areas that involve robot-human interactions. The work presented in this paper is intended to open up a discussion on appropriate techniques to systematically assess robot-human interactions. Such research is important for the development of robots in human-inhabited environments.
---
paper_title: An atlas of physical human-robot interaction

paper_content:

Abstract A broad spectrum of issues have to be addressed in order to tackle the problem of a safe and dependable physical Human–Robot Interaction (pHRI). In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and dependability have to be found in order to successfully introduce robots in everyday enviornments. While there are certainly also “cognitive” issues involved, due to the human perception of the robot (and vice versa), and other objective metrics related to fault detection and isolation, our discussion focuses on the peculiar aspects of “physical” interaction with robots. In particular, safety and dependability are the underlying evaluation criteria for mechanical design, actuation, and control architectures. Mechanical and control issues are discussed with emphasis on techniques that provide safety in an intrinsic way or by means of control components. Attention is devoted to dependability, mainly related to sensors, control architectures, and fault handling and tolerance. Suggestions are provided to draft metrics for evaluating safety and dependability in pHRI, and references to the works of the scientific groups involved in the pHRI research complete the study. The present atlas is a result of the EURON perspective research project “Physical Human–Robot Interaction in anthropic DOMains (PHRIDOM)”, aimed at charting the new territory of pHRI, and constitutes the scientific basis for the ongoing STReP project “Physical Human–Robot Interaction: depENDability and Safety (PHRIENDS)”, aimed at developing key components for the next generation of robots, designed to share their environment with people.
---
paper_title: Classifying human-robot interaction: an updated taxonomy

paper_content:

This paper extends taxonomy of human-robot interaction (HRI) introduced in 2002 to include additional categories as well as updates to the categories from the original taxonomy. New classifications include measures of the social nature of the task (human interaction roles and human-robot physical proximity), task type, and robot morphology.
---
paper_title: A Survey of Robot Tactile Sensing Technology

paper_content:

This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art in tactile sens ing technology. We examine in detail the different methods of transduction employed by tactile sensors and describe various significant designs that incorporate these methods. We then describe the different techniques used to process and analyze tactile data. Finally, we conclude with an assessment of the current state of development.
---
paper_title: Ubiquitous surface tactile sensor

paper_content:

Ubiquitous surface tactile sensor is a sensor sensible of pressure and its position on a flexible curbed surface. This technology was developed for a surface tactile sensor over the body of a seal-type robot for therapy, and then the sensor was used practically and successfully. The sensor was developed by the author and Microgenics Co., a electronic parts company. The future applications of this sensor are expected as follows: Toy robots and stuffed toys providing mental and physiological effect for patients or aged people, wearable sensors with a touch-panel function allowing rolling or wearing them, vehicle seats, aircraft seats, and office chairs that are sensible of subtle pressure and maintain the best comfortableness, bedsore-free patient beds, and keyless flat PC keyboards.
---
paper_title: Theory and evaluation of human robot interactions

paper_content:

Human-robot interaction (HRI) for mobile robots is still in its infancy. Most user interactions with robots have been limited to tele-operation capabilities where the most common interface provided to the user has been the video feed from the robotic platform and some way of directing the path of the robot. For mobile robots with semiautonomous capabilities, the user is also provided with a means of setting way points. More importantly, most HRI capabilities have been developed by robotics experts for use by robotics experts. As robots increase in capabilities and are able to perform more tasks in an autonomous manner we need to think about the interactions that humans will have with robots and what software architecture and user interface designs can accommodate the human in-the-loop. We also need to design systems that can be used by domain experts but not robotics experts. This paper outlines a theory of human-robot interaction and proposes the interactions and information needed by both humans and robots for the different levels of interaction, including an evaluation methodology based on situational awareness.
---
paper_title: Development of the Tactile Sensor System of a Human-Interactive Robot “RI-MAN”

paper_content:

Human-interactive robots, such as those used for nursing, which share humans' environments and interact with them, should be covered with soft areal tactile sensors for safety and dexterous manipulation. We report the successful development of the tactile sensor system of our human-interactive robot named RI-MAN, which can lift up a dummy human.
---
paper_title: Human-humanoid physical interaction realizing force following and task fulfillment

paper_content:

The authors describe the control methods used for a humanoid's compliant behavior following human force and motions while fulfilling given tasks under various constraint conditions during Physical InterFerence (PIF) with a human. PIF is a form of physical interaction viewed from the robot's point of view. In cases of PIF occurrence, PIF Adapting Behaviors for attenuating physical influences caused by PIF on both a human body and a robots' task are required. First, a base control method for compliantly following PIF by coordinating multiple joints of the arms and trunk is presented. By utilizing this method, PIF force produced on several areas of the robot's entire body is efficiently reduced. Next, the control methods for fulfilling given tasks, as well as following PIF at the same time, are proposed. In these methods, the idea is incorporated that if the utilization of redundancy is needed for task fulfillment or constraint conditions and attributes of the given task are changed, the role of each joint needs to change as well. Adapting to the diversity of task attributes and also the necessity of utilizing redundancy, the proposed control methods enable the robots to realize both force following and task fulfillment at the same time. Finally, from the evaluation of the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed methods realize a humanoid's capability of compliantly adapting to human motions while fulfilling tasks by efficiently utilizing redundancy.
---
paper_title: Dance partner robot - Ms DanceR

paper_content:

We propose a dance partner robot referred to as Ms DanceR (Mobile Smart Dance Robot), which has been developed as platform for realizing the effective human-robot coordination with physical interaction. Ms DanceR consists of an omni-directional mobile base and a Body Force Sensor, which is a force/torque sensor installed between the mobile base and the body of the robot. A human could dance a ballroom dance together with Ms DanceR based on a control architecture referred to as "CAST" (Control Architecture based-on Step Transition), which was designed according to features of ballroom dances.
---
paper_title: Robovie-IV: A Communication Robot Interacting with People Daily in an Office

paper_content:

We believe that robots will take an active part in our daily lives in the near future. Once this time arrives, robots will be expected to have the social skills necessary for interacting with people in addition to the ability to carry out their own tasks. We call an interaction that increases familiarity and makes communication smoother a "social interaction." We have recently developed a human-size humanoid, called "Robovie-IV," which will have the ability to interact with people in their daily lives. This paper discusses the design requirements for humanrobot interaction by a communication robot, then introduces an overview of Robovie-IV's hardware and software architectures. There are also preliminary results of a daily experiment that we are currently conducting with Robovie-IV in our office.
---
paper_title: Cheek to Chip: Dancing Robots and AI's Future

paper_content:

Recent generations of humanoid robots increasingly resemble humans in shape and articulatory capacities. This progress has motivated researchers to design dancing robots that can mimic the complexity and style of human choreographic dancing. Such complicated actions are usually programmed manually and ad hoc. However, this approach is both tedious and inflexible. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed the learning-from-observation (LFO) training method to overcome this difficulty.1-2 LFO enables a robot to acquire knowledge of what to do and how to do it from observing human demonstrations. Direct mapping from human joint angles to robot joint angles doesn't work well because of the dynamic and kinematic differences between the observed person and the robot (for example, weight, balance, and arm and leg lengths). LFO therefore relies on predesigned task models, which represent only the actions (and features thereof) that are essential to mimicry. Then it adapts these actions to the robot's morphology and dynamics so that it can mimic the movement. This indirect, two-step mapping is crucial for robust imitation and performance.
---
paper_title: Tactile gestures for human/robot interaction

paper_content:

Gesture-based programming is a new paradigm to ease the burden of programming robots. By tapping in to the user's wealth of experience with contact transitions, compliance, uncertainty and operations sequencing, we hope to provide a more intuitive programming environment for complex, real-world tasks based on the expressiveness of nonverbal communication. A requirement for this to be accomplished is the ability to interpret gestures to infer the intentions behind them. As a first step toward this goal, this paper presents an application of distributed perception for inferring a user's intentions by observing tactile gestures. These gestures consist of sparse, inexact, physical "nudges" applied to the robot's end effector for the purpose of modifying its trajectory in free space. A set of independent agents-each with its own local, fuzzified, heuristic model of a particular trajectory parameter observes data from a wristforce/torque sensor to evaluate the gestures. The agents then independently determine the confidence of their respective findings and distributed arbitration resolves the interpretation through voting.
---
paper_title: Humanoid robot which can lift a 30kg box by whole body contact and tactile feedback

paper_content:

We present realization of a humanoid which can lift a heavy object by whole body contact. Most humanoid motions are limited to the posture of the end-effectors only landing. In principle these humanoids can not do natural motion. If a humanoid robot is allowed arbitrary contact with the surrounding objects, it can improve the performance and operate a heavier object. We propose a "whole body contact motion" of a humanoid robot. It is defined as a control of contact state of a humanoid robot which has the distributed tactile sensors. We develop conformable and scalable tactile skin and an adult-size humanoid with a smooth surfaces for arbitrary contact. We install the skin on the entire surfaces of the humanoid. Finally we describe the humanoid lifting a 30kg box by tactile feedback.
---
paper_title: Human-robot-contact-state identification based on tactile recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a method for designing an identification system for human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition. The following ideas are incorporated: experimentation for human-robot contact, verbalization of contact states, extraction of characteristic parameters from acquired tactile information, quantification of the recipient's tactile recognition incorporating its redundancy (identification confusability among contact states), evaluation of the identification confusability with a new criterion, and identification of contact states based on the received tactile stimulation. The proposed method allows a robot to quantify tactile recognition of a human (recipient) touched by other people (touch initiator), in which the verbal response by the recipient is matched with tactile stimulation acquired during physical contact utilizing a tactile interface. In addition, the method enables a robot that comes into contact with a human to identify contact states nearly similar to that of the recipient, based on the features of the received tactile stimulation. At this point, the reproduction of the identification confusability of the recipient's tactile recognition is also accomplished by using a neural network called modified counterpropagation (MCP). Once a tactile stimulation is induced on the robot body, the probability of corresponding contact states is calculated and outputted by the system, based on the degree of similarity of the characteristics between the newly received and previously stored tactile stimulation. Experimental results indicate that the constructed system allows a successful quantification of the recipient's contact-state recognition incorporating the identification confusability and the accomplishment of a high level of accuracy in contact-state identification. These results confirm that the proposed method is useful for identifying human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition.
---
paper_title: Human-Robot Interaction Based on a Sensitive Bumper Skin

paper_content:

In order to enable robots to work in close contact with humans or in environments with unknown obstacles, new reactive control strategies based on sensitive bumper skins are proposed. The aim of this work is to provide a robot with contact and force control based strategies that make it dependable, safe and with foreseeable behaviours. The sensory skin is composed of rigid-bumpers provided with deformation sensors incorporated in a flexible substrate. This solution is a compromise between a simple bumper skin and current array-based robot skins, with better potential performances but, more costly and with usability problems. Such sensitive bumpers cover all moveable links of the robot allowing the detection of collisions, measuring the force involved and locating the point of contact with reasonable precision and cost.
---
paper_title: Robovie: An interactive humanoid robot

paper_content:

The authors have developed a robot called “Robovie” that has unique mechanisms designed for communication with humans. Robovie can generate human‐like behaviors by using human‐like actuators and vision and audio sensors. Software is a key element in the systems development. Two important ideas in human‐robot communication through research from the viewpoint of cognitive science have been obtained – one is importance of physical expressions using the body and the other is the effectiveness of the robot’s autonomy in the robot’s utterance recognition by humans. Based on these psychological experiments, a new architecture that generates episode chains in interactions with humans is developed. The basic structure of the architecture is a network of situated modules. Each module consists of elemental behaviors to entrain humans and a behavior for communicating with humans.
---
paper_title: Programming by touch: the different way of human-robot interaction

paper_content:

Mobile service robots will share their workspaces, e.g., offices, hospitals, or households, with humans. Thus, a direct contact between man and machine is inevitable. Robots equipped with appropriate sensors can sense the touch. In this paper, we present how an unskilled user can intuitively teach the lightweight robot at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), We/spl szlig/ling, Germany, just by touching the arm. Programming by "touch" is very intuitive as you take the robot by the hand and demonstrate the movements. This feature can also be used to interact with the service robot while executing a task. Therefore, if our seven-degrees-of-freedom robot arm senses a touch, it will react by an evasive motion of the touched links while keeping the orientation of the tool center point.
---
paper_title: Generating natural motion in an android by mapping human motion

paper_content:

One of the main aims of humanoid robotics is to develop robots that are capable of interacting naturally with people. However, to understand the essence of human interaction, it is crucial to investigate the contribution of behavior and appearance. Our group's research explores these relationships by developing androids that closely resemble human beings in both aspects. If humanlike appearance causes us to evaluate an android's behavior from a human standard, we are more likely to be cognizant of deviations from human norms. Therefore, the android's motions must closely match human performance to avoid looking strange, including such autonomic responses as the shoulder movements involved in breathing. This paper proposes a method to implement motions that look human by mapping their three-dimensional appearance from a human performer to the android and then evaluating the verisimilitude of the visible motions using a motion capture system. This approach has several advantages over current research, which has focused on copying a person's moving joint angles to a robot: (1) in an android robot with many degrees of freedom and kinematics that differs from that of a human being, it is difficult to calculate which joint angles would make the robot's posture appear similar to the human performer; and (2) the motion that we perceive is at the robot's surface, not necessarily at its joints, which are often hidden from view.
---
paper_title: Conformable and scalable tactile sensor skin for curved surfaces

paper_content:

We present the design and realization of a conformable tactile sensor skin (patent pending). The skin is organized as a network of self-contained modules consisting of tiny pressure-sensitive elements which communicate through a serial bus. By adding or removing modules it is possible to adjust the area covered by the skin as well as the number (and density) of tactile elements. The skin is therefore highly modular and thus intrinsically scalable. Moreover, because the substrate on which the modules are mounted is sufficiently pliable to be folded and stiff enough to be cut, it is possible to freely distribute the individual tactile elements. A tactile skin composed of multiple modules can also be installed on curved surfaces. Due to their easy configurability we call our sensors "cut-and-paste tactile sensors." We describe a prototype implementation of the skin on a humanoid robot
---
paper_title: Online touch behavior recognition of hard-cover robot using temporal decision tree classifier

paper_content:

Touch is obviously an important channel along with vision and speech for natural human robot Interaction. However, as most service robots are generally specialized for their own service, touch-centered shape design and additional costs/computation less related to their own tasks can represent a limit to the application of a touch system on a service robot. This paper originated from the motivation to apply a touch system with lower costs/computation to robots without design modifications. The proposed touch recognition system features hardware that is simply composed of charge-transfer touch sensor arrays, an accelerometer and a temporal decision tree classifier intended for online recognition and computational time reduction. Experiments performed by 12 people shows the practicability of the system. The results showed an average recognition rate of 83% with respect to the 4 touch patterns of hit, beat, rub and push.
---
paper_title: Reducing influence of robot’s motion on tactile sensor based on partially linear model

paper_content:

Robots that are supposed to work and communicate with humans in our daily life have been developed in recent years. For this kind of robots, sensitive tactile sensors are necessary to achieve haptic interactions. However, influences of its own motion on tactile sensors sometimes become larger than the signal to be detected. This paper proposes a method to reduce such noises. It is enabled by estimating and subtracting the influences from sensor outputs. The influences of robotpsilas motions on tactile sensors are estimated by using the sequence of joint angles of the robot. In our method, a partially linear model is built to estimate the influences on a tactile sensor. The robotpsilas posture space, which is represented by its joint angles, is divided into several subspaces to fit to a linear model. We conducted an experiment with a robot covered with tactile sensors to verify the validity of our method. This paper shows that the robot is able to estimate the influences on a tactile sensor in high accuracy by the model.
---
paper_title: Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

paper_content:

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra's interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.
---
paper_title: Haptic Communication Between Humans and Robots

paper_content:

This paper introduces the haptic communication robots we developed and proposes a method for detecting human positions and postures based on haptic interaction between humanoid robots and humans. We have developed two types of humanoid robots that have tactile sensors embedded in a soft skin that covers the robot’s entire body as tools for studying haptic communication. Tactile sensation could be used to detect a communication partner’s position and posture even if the vision sensor did not observe the person. In the proposed method, the robot obtains a map that statistically describes relationships between its tactile information and human positions/postures from the records of haptic interaction taken by tactile sensors and a motion capturing system during communication. The robot can then estimate its communication partner’s position/posture based on the tactile sensor outputs and the map. To verify the method’s performance, we implemented it in the haptic communication robot. Results of experiments show that the robot can estimate a communication partner’s position/posture statistically.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: A sensor for dynamic tactile information with applications in human-robot interaction and object exploration

paper_content:

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tactile information corresponding roughly to two types of tactile sensor in the human skin. The complete sensor consists of a foil-based static force sensor, which yields the total force and the center of the two-dimensional force distribution and is surrounded by an array of the dynamical sensor elements. One such sensor has been mounted on each of the two gripper jaws of our humanoid robot and equipped with the necessary read-out electronics and a CAN bus interface. We describe applications to guiding a robot arm on a desired trajectory with negligible force, reflective grip improvement, and tactile exploration of objects to create a shape representation and find stable grips, which are applied autonomously on the basis of visual recognition.
---
paper_title: A full-body tactile sensor suit using electrically conductive fabric and strings

paper_content:

We present design and implementation of a tactile sensor system, sensor suit, that covers the entire body of a robot. The sensor suit is designed to be soft and flexible and to have a large number of sensing regions. We have built the sensor suit using electrically conductive fabric and string. The current version of the sensor suit has 192 sensing regions. Each sensing region works as a binary switch in the current version. All of the signals from the sensor suit are gathered and superimposed on a visual image of the robot. The video multiplexer for the sensor signals is built on a field programmable gate array set. The construction of sensor suit system and its application with a full-body humanoid are presented.
---
paper_title: Reactive motion control for human-robot tactile interaction

paper_content:

In the field of service robotics, robots serve and assist human beings. It is natural for humans to directly interact with the robot via tactile interfaces. This paper introduces several kinds of tactile interactions between a user and the robot as well as interactions of the robot with the environment. All interactions are implemented in a single paradigm: Forces measured from tactile sensors result in motion vectors at the contact points. The motion vectors from different sensors are superimposed and then determine the robot's joint velocities. We present results from our experimental setup consisting of an 8 degrees of freedom manipulator arm mounted on a mobile platform. In the illustrated example, a human interacts with the robot using only the tactile interface.
---
paper_title: Physical and affective interaction between human and mental commit robot

paper_content:

This paper introduces the research on mental commit robot that seeks a different direction which is not so rigidly dependent on such objective measures. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with an emphasis on human-robot interaction. In the previous research, we introduced a cat robot and evaluated it by interviewing many people. However, some subjects gave severe comments on structure of the cat robot appearance because they associated and compared it with a real cat based on their own experiences and knowledge. This paper investigates the influence of a priori knowledge into subjective interpretation and evaluation of a mental commit robot. We develop a new seal robot that has appearance of a baby of harp seal. Most people did not know harp seal precisely nor have experience of interaction with it. The subjects evaluated the seal robot while interacting with it. Comparing with the results of the previous research, we show that a priori knowledge on model of robots had much influence on subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commit robots by short-term interaction.
---
paper_title: Recognizing human touching behaviors using a haptic interface for a pet-robot

paper_content:

This paper presents the preliminary results of classifying human touching behaviors using a haptic interface for a pet-like robot. The haptic interface uses gridded pressure-sensitive conductive ink sheets. Features of the measured pressure data are determined for classification in terms of 1) absolute values, 2) spatial distributions and 3) the temporal differences in measured pressure patterns. Touching behaviors include "slap," "pat," "stroke" and so forth. The experimental results show that a reliable classification of these touching patterns can be accomplished by using the sensor sheet and pressure features. The results of classification can be used as reward signals for reinforcement learning in controlling the behaviors of a pet-like robot that interacts with humans.
---
paper_title: A small biped entertainment robot exploring human-robot interactive applications

paper_content:

A small biped entertainment robot SDR-4X II is expanding its capabilities for the adaptability in home environment with enhanced core technologies. Conspicuous enhancements are safe design and functions such as integrated adaptive fall-over motion control, pinch avoidance motion control and lift-up motion control for safe interaction with human. We have also developed and enhanced new robot actuators, ISA and real-time integrated adaptive motion control system as a comprehensive motion control for SDR to realize the dynamic and smooth/elegant motion performances. One of the significant motion control related technologies is motion creating system which allows us to create SDR's attractive motion performances. In addition, we have explored and developed entertainment applications using these technologies. A singing dance performance and a fast-paced dance performance are introduced as the attractive applications.
---
paper_title: A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

paper_content:

This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot's tool center point as well as abstract commands like ldquostoprdquo or ldquograsp object x with grasp type yrdquo. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient symbol recognition implementation achieves real-time performance while being platform-independent. We have successfully used both a multi-touch finger pad and our artificial robot skin as tactile interfaces. The evaluation of our tactile language system was done using test persons that had to learn to language symbols, perform certain missions, and finally report on their experience using the NASA Task Load Index.
---
paper_title: A sensor for dynamic tactile information with applications in human-robot interaction and object exploration

paper_content:

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tactile information corresponding roughly to two types of tactile sensor in the human skin. The complete sensor consists of a foil-based static force sensor, which yields the total force and the center of the two-dimensional force distribution and is surrounded by an array of the dynamical sensor elements. One such sensor has been mounted on each of the two gripper jaws of our humanoid robot and equipped with the necessary read-out electronics and a CAN bus interface. We describe applications to guiding a robot arm on a desired trajectory with negligible force, reflective grip improvement, and tactile exploration of objects to create a shape representation and find stable grips, which are applied autonomously on the basis of visual recognition.
---
paper_title: Robovie-IV: A Communication Robot Interacting with People Daily in an Office

paper_content:

We believe that robots will take an active part in our daily lives in the near future. Once this time arrives, robots will be expected to have the social skills necessary for interacting with people in addition to the ability to carry out their own tasks. We call an interaction that increases familiarity and makes communication smoother a "social interaction." We have recently developed a human-size humanoid, called "Robovie-IV," which will have the ability to interact with people in their daily lives. This paper discusses the design requirements for humanrobot interaction by a communication robot, then introduces an overview of Robovie-IV's hardware and software architectures. There are also preliminary results of a daily experiment that we are currently conducting with Robovie-IV in our office.
---
paper_title: Humanoid robot which can lift a 30kg box by whole body contact and tactile feedback

paper_content:

We present realization of a humanoid which can lift a heavy object by whole body contact. Most humanoid motions are limited to the posture of the end-effectors only landing. In principle these humanoids can not do natural motion. If a humanoid robot is allowed arbitrary contact with the surrounding objects, it can improve the performance and operate a heavier object. We propose a "whole body contact motion" of a humanoid robot. It is defined as a control of contact state of a humanoid robot which has the distributed tactile sensors. We develop conformable and scalable tactile skin and an adult-size humanoid with a smooth surfaces for arbitrary contact. We install the skin on the entire surfaces of the humanoid. Finally we describe the humanoid lifting a 30kg box by tactile feedback.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: Collision-tolerant control of human-friendly robot with viscoelastic trunk

paper_content:

A human-friendly robot (HFR) is described to realize human safety, and a collision-tolerant control method is also proposed to achieve task performance. The HFR consists of an arm covered with viscoelastic materials and a trunk with mechanical elements, such as springs and dampers. In an unexpected or expected collision with a human, the passive viscoelastic trunk of the HFR passively deforms in response to the collision/contact forces. It is difficult, however, for the end effector to perform a desired task owing to the deformation of the passive trunk. In order to deal with this problem, the joint configurations of the arm are directly calculated according to the passive trunk deformation. The HFR with the passive viscoelastic trunk is compared with a conventional industrial robot with a rigid trunk for evaluation. Simulation and experimental results confirm that the proposed control method is useful for the end-effector position control and the passive viscoelastic trunk suitable for the suppression of collision/contact forces.
---
paper_title: Human-humanoid physical interaction realizing force following and task fulfillment

paper_content:

The authors describe the control methods used for a humanoid's compliant behavior following human force and motions while fulfilling given tasks under various constraint conditions during Physical InterFerence (PIF) with a human. PIF is a form of physical interaction viewed from the robot's point of view. In cases of PIF occurrence, PIF Adapting Behaviors for attenuating physical influences caused by PIF on both a human body and a robots' task are required. First, a base control method for compliantly following PIF by coordinating multiple joints of the arms and trunk is presented. By utilizing this method, PIF force produced on several areas of the robot's entire body is efficiently reduced. Next, the control methods for fulfilling given tasks, as well as following PIF at the same time, are proposed. In these methods, the idea is incorporated that if the utilization of redundancy is needed for task fulfillment or constraint conditions and attributes of the given task are changed, the role of each joint needs to change as well. Adapting to the diversity of task attributes and also the necessity of utilizing redundancy, the proposed control methods enable the robots to realize both force following and task fulfillment at the same time. Finally, from the evaluation of the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed methods realize a humanoid's capability of compliantly adapting to human motions while fulfilling tasks by efficiently utilizing redundancy.
---
paper_title: Human-robot-contact-state identification based on tactile recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a method for designing an identification system for human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition. The following ideas are incorporated: experimentation for human-robot contact, verbalization of contact states, extraction of characteristic parameters from acquired tactile information, quantification of the recipient's tactile recognition incorporating its redundancy (identification confusability among contact states), evaluation of the identification confusability with a new criterion, and identification of contact states based on the received tactile stimulation. The proposed method allows a robot to quantify tactile recognition of a human (recipient) touched by other people (touch initiator), in which the verbal response by the recipient is matched with tactile stimulation acquired during physical contact utilizing a tactile interface. In addition, the method enables a robot that comes into contact with a human to identify contact states nearly similar to that of the recipient, based on the features of the received tactile stimulation. At this point, the reproduction of the identification confusability of the recipient's tactile recognition is also accomplished by using a neural network called modified counterpropagation (MCP). Once a tactile stimulation is induced on the robot body, the probability of corresponding contact states is calculated and outputted by the system, based on the degree of similarity of the characteristics between the newly received and previously stored tactile stimulation. Experimental results indicate that the constructed system allows a successful quantification of the recipient's contact-state recognition incorporating the identification confusability and the accomplishment of a high level of accuracy in contact-state identification. These results confirm that the proposed method is useful for identifying human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition.
---
paper_title: Human-Robot Interaction Based on a Sensitive Bumper Skin

paper_content:

In order to enable robots to work in close contact with humans or in environments with unknown obstacles, new reactive control strategies based on sensitive bumper skins are proposed. The aim of this work is to provide a robot with contact and force control based strategies that make it dependable, safe and with foreseeable behaviours. The sensory skin is composed of rigid-bumpers provided with deformation sensors incorporated in a flexible substrate. This solution is a compromise between a simple bumper skin and current array-based robot skins, with better potential performances but, more costly and with usability problems. Such sensitive bumpers cover all moveable links of the robot allowing the detection of collisions, measuring the force involved and locating the point of contact with reasonable precision and cost.
---
paper_title: Programming by touch: the different way of human-robot interaction

paper_content:

Mobile service robots will share their workspaces, e.g., offices, hospitals, or households, with humans. Thus, a direct contact between man and machine is inevitable. Robots equipped with appropriate sensors can sense the touch. In this paper, we present how an unskilled user can intuitively teach the lightweight robot at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), We/spl szlig/ling, Germany, just by touching the arm. Programming by "touch" is very intuitive as you take the robot by the hand and demonstrate the movements. This feature can also be used to interact with the service robot while executing a task. Therefore, if our seven-degrees-of-freedom robot arm senses a touch, it will react by an evasive motion of the touched links while keeping the orientation of the tool center point.
---
paper_title: Reactive motion control for human-robot tactile interaction

paper_content:

In the field of service robotics, robots serve and assist human beings. It is natural for humans to directly interact with the robot via tactile interfaces. This paper introduces several kinds of tactile interactions between a user and the robot as well as interactions of the robot with the environment. All interactions are implemented in a single paradigm: Forces measured from tactile sensors result in motion vectors at the contact points. The motion vectors from different sensors are superimposed and then determine the robot's joint velocities. We present results from our experimental setup consisting of an 8 degrees of freedom manipulator arm mounted on a mobile platform. In the illustrated example, a human interacts with the robot using only the tactile interface.
---
paper_title: Whole-body covering tactile interface for human robot coordination

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a design method of wholebody tactile interface for elevating human-robot coordination. The proposed surface cover sensor as the tactile interface enables robots to detect accurate 3D force vector applied on various parts of the body during physical interaction with humans. First, after analysis of a variety of contact situations between humans and robots, tactile and force information needed are specified, and the specifications are decided based on knowledge of human engineering. Next, a design method of a cover sensor that can detect accurate force vector and contact position is described. The cover sensor utilizes a force-torque sensor and is surrounded with several touch sensors. The mechanism was implemented on a humanoid robot, WENDY. Finally, evaluation experiments of locus tracking on the surface and force-following to humans were carried out. The experimental results demonstrate the high capabilities of the proposed cover sensor as human-robot interface, and indicate that the proposed design method of whole-body tactile interface is capable of enhancing human-robot coordination.
---
paper_title: A small biped entertainment robot exploring human-robot interactive applications

paper_content:

A small biped entertainment robot SDR-4X II is expanding its capabilities for the adaptability in home environment with enhanced core technologies. Conspicuous enhancements are safe design and functions such as integrated adaptive fall-over motion control, pinch avoidance motion control and lift-up motion control for safe interaction with human. We have also developed and enhanced new robot actuators, ISA and real-time integrated adaptive motion control system as a comprehensive motion control for SDR to realize the dynamic and smooth/elegant motion performances. One of the significant motion control related technologies is motion creating system which allows us to create SDR's attractive motion performances. In addition, we have explored and developed entertainment applications using these technologies. A singing dance performance and a fast-paced dance performance are introduced as the attractive applications.
---
paper_title: Human-robot-contact-state identification based on tactile recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a method for designing an identification system for human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition. The following ideas are incorporated: experimentation for human-robot contact, verbalization of contact states, extraction of characteristic parameters from acquired tactile information, quantification of the recipient's tactile recognition incorporating its redundancy (identification confusability among contact states), evaluation of the identification confusability with a new criterion, and identification of contact states based on the received tactile stimulation. The proposed method allows a robot to quantify tactile recognition of a human (recipient) touched by other people (touch initiator), in which the verbal response by the recipient is matched with tactile stimulation acquired during physical contact utilizing a tactile interface. In addition, the method enables a robot that comes into contact with a human to identify contact states nearly similar to that of the recipient, based on the features of the received tactile stimulation. At this point, the reproduction of the identification confusability of the recipient's tactile recognition is also accomplished by using a neural network called modified counterpropagation (MCP). Once a tactile stimulation is induced on the robot body, the probability of corresponding contact states is calculated and outputted by the system, based on the degree of similarity of the characteristics between the newly received and previously stored tactile stimulation. Experimental results indicate that the constructed system allows a successful quantification of the recipient's contact-state recognition incorporating the identification confusability and the accomplishment of a high level of accuracy in contact-state identification. These results confirm that the proposed method is useful for identifying human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition.
---
paper_title: A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

paper_content:

This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot's tool center point as well as abstract commands like ldquostoprdquo or ldquograsp object x with grasp type yrdquo. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient symbol recognition implementation achieves real-time performance while being platform-independent. We have successfully used both a multi-touch finger pad and our artificial robot skin as tactile interfaces. The evaluation of our tactile language system was done using test persons that had to learn to language symbols, perform certain missions, and finally report on their experience using the NASA Task Load Index.
---
paper_title: A sensor for dynamic tactile information with applications in human-robot interaction and object exploration

paper_content:

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tactile information corresponding roughly to two types of tactile sensor in the human skin. The complete sensor consists of a foil-based static force sensor, which yields the total force and the center of the two-dimensional force distribution and is surrounded by an array of the dynamical sensor elements. One such sensor has been mounted on each of the two gripper jaws of our humanoid robot and equipped with the necessary read-out electronics and a CAN bus interface. We describe applications to guiding a robot arm on a desired trajectory with negligible force, reflective grip improvement, and tactile exploration of objects to create a shape representation and find stable grips, which are applied autonomously on the basis of visual recognition.
---
paper_title: Tactile gestures for human/robot interaction

paper_content:

Gesture-based programming is a new paradigm to ease the burden of programming robots. By tapping in to the user's wealth of experience with contact transitions, compliance, uncertainty and operations sequencing, we hope to provide a more intuitive programming environment for complex, real-world tasks based on the expressiveness of nonverbal communication. A requirement for this to be accomplished is the ability to interpret gestures to infer the intentions behind them. As a first step toward this goal, this paper presents an application of distributed perception for inferring a user's intentions by observing tactile gestures. These gestures consist of sparse, inexact, physical "nudges" applied to the robot's end effector for the purpose of modifying its trajectory in free space. A set of independent agents-each with its own local, fuzzified, heuristic model of a particular trajectory parameter observes data from a wristforce/torque sensor to evaluate the gestures. The agents then independently determine the confidence of their respective findings and distributed arbitration resolves the interpretation through voting.
---
paper_title: Reactive motion control for human-robot tactile interaction

paper_content:

In the field of service robotics, robots serve and assist human beings. It is natural for humans to directly interact with the robot via tactile interfaces. This paper introduces several kinds of tactile interactions between a user and the robot as well as interactions of the robot with the environment. All interactions are implemented in a single paradigm: Forces measured from tactile sensors result in motion vectors at the contact points. The motion vectors from different sensors are superimposed and then determine the robot's joint velocities. We present results from our experimental setup consisting of an 8 degrees of freedom manipulator arm mounted on a mobile platform. In the illustrated example, a human interacts with the robot using only the tactile interface.
---
paper_title: Whole-body covering tactile interface for human robot coordination

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a design method of wholebody tactile interface for elevating human-robot coordination. The proposed surface cover sensor as the tactile interface enables robots to detect accurate 3D force vector applied on various parts of the body during physical interaction with humans. First, after analysis of a variety of contact situations between humans and robots, tactile and force information needed are specified, and the specifications are decided based on knowledge of human engineering. Next, a design method of a cover sensor that can detect accurate force vector and contact position is described. The cover sensor utilizes a force-torque sensor and is surrounded with several touch sensors. The mechanism was implemented on a humanoid robot, WENDY. Finally, evaluation experiments of locus tracking on the surface and force-following to humans were carried out. The experimental results demonstrate the high capabilities of the proposed cover sensor as human-robot interface, and indicate that the proposed design method of whole-body tactile interface is capable of enhancing human-robot coordination.
---
paper_title: A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

paper_content:

This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot's tool center point as well as abstract commands like ldquostoprdquo or ldquograsp object x with grasp type yrdquo. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient symbol recognition implementation achieves real-time performance while being platform-independent. We have successfully used both a multi-touch finger pad and our artificial robot skin as tactile interfaces. The evaluation of our tactile language system was done using test persons that had to learn to language symbols, perform certain missions, and finally report on their experience using the NASA Task Load Index.
---
paper_title: A sensor for dynamic tactile information with applications in human-robot interaction and object exploration

paper_content:

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tactile information corresponding roughly to two types of tactile sensor in the human skin. The complete sensor consists of a foil-based static force sensor, which yields the total force and the center of the two-dimensional force distribution and is surrounded by an array of the dynamical sensor elements. One such sensor has been mounted on each of the two gripper jaws of our humanoid robot and equipped with the necessary read-out electronics and a CAN bus interface. We describe applications to guiding a robot arm on a desired trajectory with negligible force, reflective grip improvement, and tactile exploration of objects to create a shape representation and find stable grips, which are applied autonomously on the basis of visual recognition.
---
paper_title: Robovie-IV: A Communication Robot Interacting with People Daily in an Office

paper_content:

We believe that robots will take an active part in our daily lives in the near future. Once this time arrives, robots will be expected to have the social skills necessary for interacting with people in addition to the ability to carry out their own tasks. We call an interaction that increases familiarity and makes communication smoother a "social interaction." We have recently developed a human-size humanoid, called "Robovie-IV," which will have the ability to interact with people in their daily lives. This paper discusses the design requirements for humanrobot interaction by a communication robot, then introduces an overview of Robovie-IV's hardware and software architectures. There are also preliminary results of a daily experiment that we are currently conducting with Robovie-IV in our office.
---
paper_title: A quantitative technique for analysing robot-human interactions

paper_content:

This paper proposes a technique for quantitatively describing and analysing robot-human interactions in terms of low-level behavioural criteria (so-called micro-behaviours). In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this technique, we describe a case study that was conducted as part of the Aurora project where we develop robotic toys as therapeutic tools for children with autism. In this project we made explicit choices of how to assess robot-human interaction and how to study the impact of interaction. Results of a comparative study with autistic children are shown where we focus on eye gaze behaviour. The results point out common tendencies as well as clear differences among the children, important information for future development of robots in the Aurora project. We propose that this technique is applicable to a wide range of application areas that involve robot-human interactions. The work presented in this paper is intended to open up a discussion on appropriate techniques to systematically assess robot-human interactions. Such research is important for the development of robots in human-inhabited environments.
---
paper_title: A full-body tactile sensor suit using electrically conductive fabric and strings

paper_content:

We present design and implementation of a tactile sensor system, sensor suit, that covers the entire body of a robot. The sensor suit is designed to be soft and flexible and to have a large number of sensing regions. We have built the sensor suit using electrically conductive fabric and string. The current version of the sensor suit has 192 sensing regions. Each sensing region works as a binary switch in the current version. All of the signals from the sensor suit are gathered and superimposed on a visual image of the robot. The video multiplexer for the sensor signals is built on a field programmable gate array set. The construction of sensor suit system and its application with a full-body humanoid are presented.
---
paper_title: An atlas of physical human-robot interaction

paper_content:

Abstract A broad spectrum of issues have to be addressed in order to tackle the problem of a safe and dependable physical Human–Robot Interaction (pHRI). In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and dependability have to be found in order to successfully introduce robots in everyday enviornments. While there are certainly also “cognitive” issues involved, due to the human perception of the robot (and vice versa), and other objective metrics related to fault detection and isolation, our discussion focuses on the peculiar aspects of “physical” interaction with robots. In particular, safety and dependability are the underlying evaluation criteria for mechanical design, actuation, and control architectures. Mechanical and control issues are discussed with emphasis on techniques that provide safety in an intrinsic way or by means of control components. Attention is devoted to dependability, mainly related to sensors, control architectures, and fault handling and tolerance. Suggestions are provided to draft metrics for evaluating safety and dependability in pHRI, and references to the works of the scientific groups involved in the pHRI research complete the study. The present atlas is a result of the EURON perspective research project “Physical Human–Robot Interaction in anthropic DOMains (PHRIDOM)”, aimed at charting the new territory of pHRI, and constitutes the scientific basis for the ongoing STReP project “Physical Human–Robot Interaction: depENDability and Safety (PHRIENDS)”, aimed at developing key components for the next generation of robots, designed to share their environment with people.
---
paper_title: Online touch behavior recognition of hard-cover robot using temporal decision tree classifier

paper_content:

Touch is obviously an important channel along with vision and speech for natural human robot Interaction. However, as most service robots are generally specialized for their own service, touch-centered shape design and additional costs/computation less related to their own tasks can represent a limit to the application of a touch system on a service robot. This paper originated from the motivation to apply a touch system with lower costs/computation to robots without design modifications. The proposed touch recognition system features hardware that is simply composed of charge-transfer touch sensor arrays, an accelerometer and a temporal decision tree classifier intended for online recognition and computational time reduction. Experiments performed by 12 people shows the practicability of the system. The results showed an average recognition rate of 83% with respect to the 4 touch patterns of hit, beat, rub and push.
---
paper_title: Physical and affective interaction between human and mental commit robot

paper_content:

This paper introduces the research on mental commit robot that seeks a different direction which is not so rigidly dependent on such objective measures. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with an emphasis on human-robot interaction. In the previous research, we introduced a cat robot and evaluated it by interviewing many people. However, some subjects gave severe comments on structure of the cat robot appearance because they associated and compared it with a real cat based on their own experiences and knowledge. This paper investigates the influence of a priori knowledge into subjective interpretation and evaluation of a mental commit robot. We develop a new seal robot that has appearance of a baby of harp seal. Most people did not know harp seal precisely nor have experience of interaction with it. The subjects evaluated the seal robot while interacting with it. Comparing with the results of the previous research, we show that a priori knowledge on model of robots had much influence on subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commit robots by short-term interaction.
---
paper_title: Reducing influence of robot’s motion on tactile sensor based on partially linear model

paper_content:

Robots that are supposed to work and communicate with humans in our daily life have been developed in recent years. For this kind of robots, sensitive tactile sensors are necessary to achieve haptic interactions. However, influences of its own motion on tactile sensors sometimes become larger than the signal to be detected. This paper proposes a method to reduce such noises. It is enabled by estimating and subtracting the influences from sensor outputs. The influences of robotpsilas motions on tactile sensors are estimated by using the sequence of joint angles of the robot. In our method, a partially linear model is built to estimate the influences on a tactile sensor. The robotpsilas posture space, which is represented by its joint angles, is divided into several subspaces to fit to a linear model. We conducted an experiment with a robot covered with tactile sensors to verify the validity of our method. This paper shows that the robot is able to estimate the influences on a tactile sensor in high accuracy by the model.
---
paper_title: Recognizing human touching behaviors using a haptic interface for a pet-robot

paper_content:

This paper presents the preliminary results of classifying human touching behaviors using a haptic interface for a pet-like robot. The haptic interface uses gridded pressure-sensitive conductive ink sheets. Features of the measured pressure data are determined for classification in terms of 1) absolute values, 2) spatial distributions and 3) the temporal differences in measured pressure patterns. Touching behaviors include "slap," "pat," "stroke" and so forth. The experimental results show that a reliable classification of these touching patterns can be accomplished by using the sensor sheet and pressure features. The results of classification can be used as reward signals for reinforcement learning in controlling the behaviors of a pet-like robot that interacts with humans.
---
paper_title: Haptic Communication Between Humans and Robots

paper_content:

This paper introduces the haptic communication robots we developed and proposes a method for detecting human positions and postures based on haptic interaction between humanoid robots and humans. We have developed two types of humanoid robots that have tactile sensors embedded in a soft skin that covers the robot’s entire body as tools for studying haptic communication. Tactile sensation could be used to detect a communication partner’s position and posture even if the vision sensor did not observe the person. In the proposed method, the robot obtains a map that statistically describes relationships between its tactile information and human positions/postures from the records of haptic interaction taken by tactile sensors and a motion capturing system during communication. The robot can then estimate its communication partner’s position/posture based on the tactile sensor outputs and the map. To verify the method’s performance, we implemented it in the haptic communication robot. Results of experiments show that the robot can estimate a communication partner’s position/posture statistically.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: Development of the Tactile Sensor System of a Human-Interactive Robot “RI-MAN”

paper_content:

Human-interactive robots, such as those used for nursing, which share humans' environments and interact with them, should be covered with soft areal tactile sensors for safety and dexterous manipulation. We report the successful development of the tactile sensor system of our human-interactive robot named RI-MAN, which can lift up a dummy human.
---
paper_title: Fall prevention control of passive intelligent walker based on human model

paper_content:

As aging progresses, fall accident of the person using the walker is an acute problem. It is necessary to know the situation of the userpsilas fall to prevent it. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the userpsilas fall by modeling of the user in real time as a solid body link model, and pay attention to the center of gravity of the model. We also propose a method for controlling a passive intelligent walker to prevent the userpsilas fall according to the support polygon and the walking characteristic of the user. We experimented with passive intelligent walker in which we implement the proposed fall prevention control and show the effectiveness of the proposal method.
---
paper_title: Dance partner robot - Ms DanceR

paper_content:

We propose a dance partner robot referred to as Ms DanceR (Mobile Smart Dance Robot), which has been developed as platform for realizing the effective human-robot coordination with physical interaction. Ms DanceR consists of an omni-directional mobile base and a Body Force Sensor, which is a force/torque sensor installed between the mobile base and the body of the robot. A human could dance a ballroom dance together with Ms DanceR based on a control architecture referred to as "CAST" (Control Architecture based-on Step Transition), which was designed according to features of ballroom dances.
---
paper_title: Cheek to Chip: Dancing Robots and AI's Future

paper_content:

Recent generations of humanoid robots increasingly resemble humans in shape and articulatory capacities. This progress has motivated researchers to design dancing robots that can mimic the complexity and style of human choreographic dancing. Such complicated actions are usually programmed manually and ad hoc. However, this approach is both tedious and inflexible. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed the learning-from-observation (LFO) training method to overcome this difficulty.1-2 LFO enables a robot to acquire knowledge of what to do and how to do it from observing human demonstrations. Direct mapping from human joint angles to robot joint angles doesn't work well because of the dynamic and kinematic differences between the observed person and the robot (for example, weight, balance, and arm and leg lengths). LFO therefore relies on predesigned task models, which represent only the actions (and features thereof) that are essential to mimicry. Then it adapts these actions to the robot's morphology and dynamics so that it can mimic the movement. This indirect, two-step mapping is crucial for robust imitation and performance.
---
paper_title: Humanoid robot which can lift a 30kg box by whole body contact and tactile feedback

paper_content:

We present realization of a humanoid which can lift a heavy object by whole body contact. Most humanoid motions are limited to the posture of the end-effectors only landing. In principle these humanoids can not do natural motion. If a humanoid robot is allowed arbitrary contact with the surrounding objects, it can improve the performance and operate a heavier object. We propose a "whole body contact motion" of a humanoid robot. It is defined as a control of contact state of a humanoid robot which has the distributed tactile sensors. We develop conformable and scalable tactile skin and an adult-size humanoid with a smooth surfaces for arbitrary contact. We install the skin on the entire surfaces of the humanoid. Finally we describe the humanoid lifting a 30kg box by tactile feedback.
---
paper_title: HMM-based Error Recovery of Dance Step Selection for Dance Partner Robot

paper_content:

A dance partner robot has been developed as an example of platforms for realizing the effective human-robot coordination with physical interactions. This robot could dance together with a human by estimating the next step intended by the human. If the robot would mistake the step estimation, the human-robot coordination could not be continued. In this paper, an error recovery method for step selections, which changes robot's behavior according to human's behavior, is designed using hidden Markov models. Experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed method.
---
paper_title: Dance partner robot cooperative motion generation with adjustable length of dance step stride based on physical interaction

paper_content:

As an example of platforms for realizing the effective human-robot coordination with physical interactions, a dance partner robot has been developed, which could dance together with a human by estimating the next dance step intended by the human. Generating robot's active motion so as to be adapted to its user could be one of essential functions in the next generation robotic technology. This paper proposes the cooperative motion generation method for the robot, which is implemented by adjusting length of dance step stride based on physical interaction between the human and the robot. Experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed method.
---
paper_title: Analyzing the “knack” of human piggyback motion based on simultaneous measurement of tactile and movement data as a basis for humanoid control

paper_content:

To help with care work and rescue operations, it is necessary for humanoid robots to have the ability to transport humans steadily and gently. In this research we consider “piggyback” motions for transporting humans. Most people can perform this motion, allowing us to measure and analyze piggyback motions of human subjects using tactile sensing and whole body movements to design whole body contact control. One interesting result of this investigation is that frictional forces are skillfully controlled by the carrier. In the first experiment, we study a “knack” that allows the carrier to reposition the rider. In the second experiment we verify the effectiveness of the knack in achieving the repositioning result. We also studied the principle of the repositioning motion, and found that it is similar in many ways to a jumping motion. Then we confirmed the validity of our modeling assumptions using a dynamical simulator.
---
paper_title: Common metrics for human-robot interaction

paper_content:

This paper describes an effort to identify common metrics for task-oriented human-robot interaction (HRI). We begin by discussing the need for a toolkit of HRI metrics. We then describe the framework of our work and identify important biasing factors that must be taken into consideration. Finally, we present suggested common metrics for standardization and a case study. Preparation of a larger, more detailed toolkit is in progress.
---
paper_title: Programming by touch: the different way of human-robot interaction

paper_content:

Mobile service robots will share their workspaces, e.g., offices, hospitals, or households, with humans. Thus, a direct contact between man and machine is inevitable. Robots equipped with appropriate sensors can sense the touch. In this paper, we present how an unskilled user can intuitively teach the lightweight robot at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), We/spl szlig/ling, Germany, just by touching the arm. Programming by "touch" is very intuitive as you take the robot by the hand and demonstrate the movements. This feature can also be used to interact with the service robot while executing a task. Therefore, if our seven-degrees-of-freedom robot arm senses a touch, it will react by an evasive motion of the touched links while keeping the orientation of the tool center point.
---
paper_title: Physical and affective interaction between human and mental commit robot

paper_content:

This paper introduces the research on mental commit robot that seeks a different direction which is not so rigidly dependent on such objective measures. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with an emphasis on human-robot interaction. In the previous research, we introduced a cat robot and evaluated it by interviewing many people. However, some subjects gave severe comments on structure of the cat robot appearance because they associated and compared it with a real cat based on their own experiences and knowledge. This paper investigates the influence of a priori knowledge into subjective interpretation and evaluation of a mental commit robot. We develop a new seal robot that has appearance of a baby of harp seal. Most people did not know harp seal precisely nor have experience of interaction with it. The subjects evaluated the seal robot while interacting with it. Comparing with the results of the previous research, we show that a priori knowledge on model of robots had much influence on subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commit robots by short-term interaction.
---
paper_title: Physical interaction learning: Behavior adaptation in cooperative human-robot tasks involving physical contact

paper_content:

In order for humans and robots to engage in direct physical interaction several requirements have to be met. Among others, robots need to be able to adapt their behavior in order to facilitate the interaction with a human partner. This can be achieved using machine learning techniques. However, most machine learning scenarios to-date do not address the question of how learning can be achieved for tightly coupled, physical touch interactions between the learning agent and a human partner. This paper presents an example for such human in-the-loop learning scenarios and proposes a computationally cheap learning algorithm for this purpose. The efficiency of this method is evaluated in an experiment, where human care givers help an android robot to stand up.
---
paper_title: Recognizing human touching behaviors using a haptic interface for a pet-robot

paper_content:

This paper presents the preliminary results of classifying human touching behaviors using a haptic interface for a pet-like robot. The haptic interface uses gridded pressure-sensitive conductive ink sheets. Features of the measured pressure data are determined for classification in terms of 1) absolute values, 2) spatial distributions and 3) the temporal differences in measured pressure patterns. Touching behaviors include "slap," "pat," "stroke" and so forth. The experimental results show that a reliable classification of these touching patterns can be accomplished by using the sensor sheet and pressure features. The results of classification can be used as reward signals for reinforcement learning in controlling the behaviors of a pet-like robot that interacts with humans.
---
paper_title: Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

paper_content:

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra's interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.
---
paper_title: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

paper_content:

Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives when interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the key ideas and algorithms of reinforcement learning. Their discussion ranges from the history of the field's intellectual foundations to the most recent developments and applications. The only necessary mathematical background is familiarity with elementary concepts of probability. The book is divided into three parts. Part I defines the reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. Part II provides basic solution methods: dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, and temporal-difference learning. Part III presents a unified view of the solution methods and incorporates artificial neural networks, eligibility traces, and planning; the two final chapters present case studies and consider the future of reinforcement learning.
---
paper_title: Classifying human-robot interaction: an updated taxonomy

paper_content:

This paper extends taxonomy of human-robot interaction (HRI) introduced in 2002 to include additional categories as well as updates to the categories from the original taxonomy. New classifications include measures of the social nature of the task (human interaction roles and human-robot physical proximity), task type, and robot morphology.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: A sensor for dynamic tactile information with applications in human-robot interaction and object exploration

paper_content:

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tactile information corresponding roughly to two types of tactile sensor in the human skin. The complete sensor consists of a foil-based static force sensor, which yields the total force and the center of the two-dimensional force distribution and is surrounded by an array of the dynamical sensor elements. One such sensor has been mounted on each of the two gripper jaws of our humanoid robot and equipped with the necessary read-out electronics and a CAN bus interface. We describe applications to guiding a robot arm on a desired trajectory with negligible force, reflective grip improvement, and tactile exploration of objects to create a shape representation and find stable grips, which are applied autonomously on the basis of visual recognition.
---
paper_title: Robovie-IV: A Communication Robot Interacting with People Daily in an Office

paper_content:

We believe that robots will take an active part in our daily lives in the near future. Once this time arrives, robots will be expected to have the social skills necessary for interacting with people in addition to the ability to carry out their own tasks. We call an interaction that increases familiarity and makes communication smoother a "social interaction." We have recently developed a human-size humanoid, called "Robovie-IV," which will have the ability to interact with people in their daily lives. This paper discusses the design requirements for humanrobot interaction by a communication robot, then introduces an overview of Robovie-IV's hardware and software architectures. There are also preliminary results of a daily experiment that we are currently conducting with Robovie-IV in our office.
---
paper_title: Human-robot-contact-state identification based on tactile recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a method for designing an identification system for human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition. The following ideas are incorporated: experimentation for human-robot contact, verbalization of contact states, extraction of characteristic parameters from acquired tactile information, quantification of the recipient's tactile recognition incorporating its redundancy (identification confusability among contact states), evaluation of the identification confusability with a new criterion, and identification of contact states based on the received tactile stimulation. The proposed method allows a robot to quantify tactile recognition of a human (recipient) touched by other people (touch initiator), in which the verbal response by the recipient is matched with tactile stimulation acquired during physical contact utilizing a tactile interface. In addition, the method enables a robot that comes into contact with a human to identify contact states nearly similar to that of the recipient, based on the features of the received tactile stimulation. At this point, the reproduction of the identification confusability of the recipient's tactile recognition is also accomplished by using a neural network called modified counterpropagation (MCP). Once a tactile stimulation is induced on the robot body, the probability of corresponding contact states is calculated and outputted by the system, based on the degree of similarity of the characteristics between the newly received and previously stored tactile stimulation. Experimental results indicate that the constructed system allows a successful quantification of the recipient's contact-state recognition incorporating the identification confusability and the accomplishment of a high level of accuracy in contact-state identification. These results confirm that the proposed method is useful for identifying human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition.
---
paper_title: Whole-body covering tactile interface for human robot coordination

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a design method of wholebody tactile interface for elevating human-robot coordination. The proposed surface cover sensor as the tactile interface enables robots to detect accurate 3D force vector applied on various parts of the body during physical interaction with humans. First, after analysis of a variety of contact situations between humans and robots, tactile and force information needed are specified, and the specifications are decided based on knowledge of human engineering. Next, a design method of a cover sensor that can detect accurate force vector and contact position is described. The cover sensor utilizes a force-torque sensor and is surrounded with several touch sensors. The mechanism was implemented on a humanoid robot, WENDY. Finally, evaluation experiments of locus tracking on the surface and force-following to humans were carried out. The experimental results demonstrate the high capabilities of the proposed cover sensor as human-robot interface, and indicate that the proposed design method of whole-body tactile interface is capable of enhancing human-robot coordination.
---
paper_title: Physical interaction learning: Behavior adaptation in cooperative human-robot tasks involving physical contact

paper_content:

In order for humans and robots to engage in direct physical interaction several requirements have to be met. Among others, robots need to be able to adapt their behavior in order to facilitate the interaction with a human partner. This can be achieved using machine learning techniques. However, most machine learning scenarios to-date do not address the question of how learning can be achieved for tightly coupled, physical touch interactions between the learning agent and a human partner. This paper presents an example for such human in-the-loop learning scenarios and proposes a computationally cheap learning algorithm for this purpose. The efficiency of this method is evaluated in an experiment, where human care givers help an android robot to stand up.
---
paper_title: Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

paper_content:

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra's interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.
---
paper_title: A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

paper_content:

This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot's tool center point as well as abstract commands like ldquostoprdquo or ldquograsp object x with grasp type yrdquo. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient symbol recognition implementation achieves real-time performance while being platform-independent. We have successfully used both a multi-touch finger pad and our artificial robot skin as tactile interfaces. The evaluation of our tactile language system was done using test persons that had to learn to language symbols, perform certain missions, and finally report on their experience using the NASA Task Load Index.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: Human-humanoid physical interaction realizing force following and task fulfillment

paper_content:

The authors describe the control methods used for a humanoid's compliant behavior following human force and motions while fulfilling given tasks under various constraint conditions during Physical InterFerence (PIF) with a human. PIF is a form of physical interaction viewed from the robot's point of view. In cases of PIF occurrence, PIF Adapting Behaviors for attenuating physical influences caused by PIF on both a human body and a robots' task are required. First, a base control method for compliantly following PIF by coordinating multiple joints of the arms and trunk is presented. By utilizing this method, PIF force produced on several areas of the robot's entire body is efficiently reduced. Next, the control methods for fulfilling given tasks, as well as following PIF at the same time, are proposed. In these methods, the idea is incorporated that if the utilization of redundancy is needed for task fulfillment or constraint conditions and attributes of the given task are changed, the role of each joint needs to change as well. Adapting to the diversity of task attributes and also the necessity of utilizing redundancy, the proposed control methods enable the robots to realize both force following and task fulfillment at the same time. Finally, from the evaluation of the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed methods realize a humanoid's capability of compliantly adapting to human motions while fulfilling tasks by efficiently utilizing redundancy.
---
paper_title: Human-robot-contact-state identification based on tactile recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a method for designing an identification system for human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition. The following ideas are incorporated: experimentation for human-robot contact, verbalization of contact states, extraction of characteristic parameters from acquired tactile information, quantification of the recipient's tactile recognition incorporating its redundancy (identification confusability among contact states), evaluation of the identification confusability with a new criterion, and identification of contact states based on the received tactile stimulation. The proposed method allows a robot to quantify tactile recognition of a human (recipient) touched by other people (touch initiator), in which the verbal response by the recipient is matched with tactile stimulation acquired during physical contact utilizing a tactile interface. In addition, the method enables a robot that comes into contact with a human to identify contact states nearly similar to that of the recipient, based on the features of the received tactile stimulation. At this point, the reproduction of the identification confusability of the recipient's tactile recognition is also accomplished by using a neural network called modified counterpropagation (MCP). Once a tactile stimulation is induced on the robot body, the probability of corresponding contact states is calculated and outputted by the system, based on the degree of similarity of the characteristics between the newly received and previously stored tactile stimulation. Experimental results indicate that the constructed system allows a successful quantification of the recipient's contact-state recognition incorporating the identification confusability and the accomplishment of a high level of accuracy in contact-state identification. These results confirm that the proposed method is useful for identifying human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition.
---
paper_title: Human-Robot Interaction Based on a Sensitive Bumper Skin

paper_content:

In order to enable robots to work in close contact with humans or in environments with unknown obstacles, new reactive control strategies based on sensitive bumper skins are proposed. The aim of this work is to provide a robot with contact and force control based strategies that make it dependable, safe and with foreseeable behaviours. The sensory skin is composed of rigid-bumpers provided with deformation sensors incorporated in a flexible substrate. This solution is a compromise between a simple bumper skin and current array-based robot skins, with better potential performances but, more costly and with usability problems. Such sensitive bumpers cover all moveable links of the robot allowing the detection of collisions, measuring the force involved and locating the point of contact with reasonable precision and cost.
---
paper_title: Online touch behavior recognition of hard-cover robot using temporal decision tree classifier

paper_content:

Touch is obviously an important channel along with vision and speech for natural human robot Interaction. However, as most service robots are generally specialized for their own service, touch-centered shape design and additional costs/computation less related to their own tasks can represent a limit to the application of a touch system on a service robot. This paper originated from the motivation to apply a touch system with lower costs/computation to robots without design modifications. The proposed touch recognition system features hardware that is simply composed of charge-transfer touch sensor arrays, an accelerometer and a temporal decision tree classifier intended for online recognition and computational time reduction. Experiments performed by 12 people shows the practicability of the system. The results showed an average recognition rate of 83% with respect to the 4 touch patterns of hit, beat, rub and push.
---
paper_title: Robovie-IV: A Communication Robot Interacting with People Daily in an Office

paper_content:

We believe that robots will take an active part in our daily lives in the near future. Once this time arrives, robots will be expected to have the social skills necessary for interacting with people in addition to the ability to carry out their own tasks. We call an interaction that increases familiarity and makes communication smoother a "social interaction." We have recently developed a human-size humanoid, called "Robovie-IV," which will have the ability to interact with people in their daily lives. This paper discusses the design requirements for humanrobot interaction by a communication robot, then introduces an overview of Robovie-IV's hardware and software architectures. There are also preliminary results of a daily experiment that we are currently conducting with Robovie-IV in our office.
---
paper_title: Physical interaction learning: Behavior adaptation in cooperative human-robot tasks involving physical contact

paper_content:

In order for humans and robots to engage in direct physical interaction several requirements have to be met. Among others, robots need to be able to adapt their behavior in order to facilitate the interaction with a human partner. This can be achieved using machine learning techniques. However, most machine learning scenarios to-date do not address the question of how learning can be achieved for tightly coupled, physical touch interactions between the learning agent and a human partner. This paper presents an example for such human in-the-loop learning scenarios and proposes a computationally cheap learning algorithm for this purpose. The efficiency of this method is evaluated in an experiment, where human care givers help an android robot to stand up.
---
paper_title: Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

paper_content:

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra's interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: Human-humanoid physical interaction realizing force following and task fulfillment

paper_content:

The authors describe the control methods used for a humanoid's compliant behavior following human force and motions while fulfilling given tasks under various constraint conditions during Physical InterFerence (PIF) with a human. PIF is a form of physical interaction viewed from the robot's point of view. In cases of PIF occurrence, PIF Adapting Behaviors for attenuating physical influences caused by PIF on both a human body and a robots' task are required. First, a base control method for compliantly following PIF by coordinating multiple joints of the arms and trunk is presented. By utilizing this method, PIF force produced on several areas of the robot's entire body is efficiently reduced. Next, the control methods for fulfilling given tasks, as well as following PIF at the same time, are proposed. In these methods, the idea is incorporated that if the utilization of redundancy is needed for task fulfillment or constraint conditions and attributes of the given task are changed, the role of each joint needs to change as well. Adapting to the diversity of task attributes and also the necessity of utilizing redundancy, the proposed control methods enable the robots to realize both force following and task fulfillment at the same time. Finally, from the evaluation of the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed methods realize a humanoid's capability of compliantly adapting to human motions while fulfilling tasks by efficiently utilizing redundancy.
---
paper_title: Robovie-IV: A Communication Robot Interacting with People Daily in an Office

paper_content:

We believe that robots will take an active part in our daily lives in the near future. Once this time arrives, robots will be expected to have the social skills necessary for interacting with people in addition to the ability to carry out their own tasks. We call an interaction that increases familiarity and makes communication smoother a "social interaction." We have recently developed a human-size humanoid, called "Robovie-IV," which will have the ability to interact with people in their daily lives. This paper discusses the design requirements for humanrobot interaction by a communication robot, then introduces an overview of Robovie-IV's hardware and software architectures. There are also preliminary results of a daily experiment that we are currently conducting with Robovie-IV in our office.
---
paper_title: Tactile gestures for human/robot interaction

paper_content:

Gesture-based programming is a new paradigm to ease the burden of programming robots. By tapping in to the user's wealth of experience with contact transitions, compliance, uncertainty and operations sequencing, we hope to provide a more intuitive programming environment for complex, real-world tasks based on the expressiveness of nonverbal communication. A requirement for this to be accomplished is the ability to interpret gestures to infer the intentions behind them. As a first step toward this goal, this paper presents an application of distributed perception for inferring a user's intentions by observing tactile gestures. These gestures consist of sparse, inexact, physical "nudges" applied to the robot's end effector for the purpose of modifying its trajectory in free space. A set of independent agents-each with its own local, fuzzified, heuristic model of a particular trajectory parameter observes data from a wristforce/torque sensor to evaluate the gestures. The agents then independently determine the confidence of their respective findings and distributed arbitration resolves the interpretation through voting.
---
paper_title: Physical and affective interaction between human and mental commit robot

paper_content:

This paper introduces the research on mental commit robot that seeks a different direction which is not so rigidly dependent on such objective measures. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with an emphasis on human-robot interaction. In the previous research, we introduced a cat robot and evaluated it by interviewing many people. However, some subjects gave severe comments on structure of the cat robot appearance because they associated and compared it with a real cat based on their own experiences and knowledge. This paper investigates the influence of a priori knowledge into subjective interpretation and evaluation of a mental commit robot. We develop a new seal robot that has appearance of a baby of harp seal. Most people did not know harp seal precisely nor have experience of interaction with it. The subjects evaluated the seal robot while interacting with it. Comparing with the results of the previous research, we show that a priori knowledge on model of robots had much influence on subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commit robots by short-term interaction.
---
paper_title: Reducing influence of robot’s motion on tactile sensor based on partially linear model

paper_content:

Robots that are supposed to work and communicate with humans in our daily life have been developed in recent years. For this kind of robots, sensitive tactile sensors are necessary to achieve haptic interactions. However, influences of its own motion on tactile sensors sometimes become larger than the signal to be detected. This paper proposes a method to reduce such noises. It is enabled by estimating and subtracting the influences from sensor outputs. The influences of robotpsilas motions on tactile sensors are estimated by using the sequence of joint angles of the robot. In our method, a partially linear model is built to estimate the influences on a tactile sensor. The robotpsilas posture space, which is represented by its joint angles, is divided into several subspaces to fit to a linear model. We conducted an experiment with a robot covered with tactile sensors to verify the validity of our method. This paper shows that the robot is able to estimate the influences on a tactile sensor in high accuracy by the model.
---
paper_title: Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

paper_content:

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra's interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.
---
paper_title: A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

paper_content:

This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot's tool center point as well as abstract commands like ldquostoprdquo or ldquograsp object x with grasp type yrdquo. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient symbol recognition implementation achieves real-time performance while being platform-independent. We have successfully used both a multi-touch finger pad and our artificial robot skin as tactile interfaces. The evaluation of our tactile language system was done using test persons that had to learn to language symbols, perform certain missions, and finally report on their experience using the NASA Task Load Index.
---
paper_title: Haptic Communication Between Humans and Robots

paper_content:

This paper introduces the haptic communication robots we developed and proposes a method for detecting human positions and postures based on haptic interaction between humanoid robots and humans. We have developed two types of humanoid robots that have tactile sensors embedded in a soft skin that covers the robot’s entire body as tools for studying haptic communication. Tactile sensation could be used to detect a communication partner’s position and posture even if the vision sensor did not observe the person. In the proposed method, the robot obtains a map that statistically describes relationships between its tactile information and human positions/postures from the records of haptic interaction taken by tactile sensors and a motion capturing system during communication. The robot can then estimate its communication partner’s position/posture based on the tactile sensor outputs and the map. To verify the method’s performance, we implemented it in the haptic communication robot. Results of experiments show that the robot can estimate a communication partner’s position/posture statistically.
---
paper_title: Human-humanoid physical interaction realizing force following and task fulfillment

paper_content:

The authors describe the control methods used for a humanoid's compliant behavior following human force and motions while fulfilling given tasks under various constraint conditions during Physical InterFerence (PIF) with a human. PIF is a form of physical interaction viewed from the robot's point of view. In cases of PIF occurrence, PIF Adapting Behaviors for attenuating physical influences caused by PIF on both a human body and a robots' task are required. First, a base control method for compliantly following PIF by coordinating multiple joints of the arms and trunk is presented. By utilizing this method, PIF force produced on several areas of the robot's entire body is efficiently reduced. Next, the control methods for fulfilling given tasks, as well as following PIF at the same time, are proposed. In these methods, the idea is incorporated that if the utilization of redundancy is needed for task fulfillment or constraint conditions and attributes of the given task are changed, the role of each joint needs to change as well. Adapting to the diversity of task attributes and also the necessity of utilizing redundancy, the proposed control methods enable the robots to realize both force following and task fulfillment at the same time. Finally, from the evaluation of the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed methods realize a humanoid's capability of compliantly adapting to human motions while fulfilling tasks by efficiently utilizing redundancy.
---
paper_title: Human-robot-contact-state identification based on tactile recognition

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a method for designing an identification system for human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition. The following ideas are incorporated: experimentation for human-robot contact, verbalization of contact states, extraction of characteristic parameters from acquired tactile information, quantification of the recipient's tactile recognition incorporating its redundancy (identification confusability among contact states), evaluation of the identification confusability with a new criterion, and identification of contact states based on the received tactile stimulation. The proposed method allows a robot to quantify tactile recognition of a human (recipient) touched by other people (touch initiator), in which the verbal response by the recipient is matched with tactile stimulation acquired during physical contact utilizing a tactile interface. In addition, the method enables a robot that comes into contact with a human to identify contact states nearly similar to that of the recipient, based on the features of the received tactile stimulation. At this point, the reproduction of the identification confusability of the recipient's tactile recognition is also accomplished by using a neural network called modified counterpropagation (MCP). Once a tactile stimulation is induced on the robot body, the probability of corresponding contact states is calculated and outputted by the system, based on the degree of similarity of the characteristics between the newly received and previously stored tactile stimulation. Experimental results indicate that the constructed system allows a successful quantification of the recipient's contact-state recognition incorporating the identification confusability and the accomplishment of a high level of accuracy in contact-state identification. These results confirm that the proposed method is useful for identifying human-robot contact states based on tactile recognition.
---
paper_title: A sensor for dynamic tactile information with applications in human-robot interaction and object exploration

paper_content:

We present a novel tactile sensor, which is applied for dextrous grasping with a simple robot gripper. The hardware novelty consists of an array of capacitive sensors, which couple to the object by means of little brushes of fibers. These sensor elements are very sensitive (with a threshold of about 5 mN) but robust enough not to be damaged during grasping. They yield two types of dynamical tactile information corresponding roughly to two types of tactile sensor in the human skin. The complete sensor consists of a foil-based static force sensor, which yields the total force and the center of the two-dimensional force distribution and is surrounded by an array of the dynamical sensor elements. One such sensor has been mounted on each of the two gripper jaws of our humanoid robot and equipped with the necessary read-out electronics and a CAN bus interface. We describe applications to guiding a robot arm on a desired trajectory with negligible force, reflective grip improvement, and tactile exploration of objects to create a shape representation and find stable grips, which are applied autonomously on the basis of visual recognition.
---
paper_title: Whole-body covering tactile interface for human robot coordination

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a design method of wholebody tactile interface for elevating human-robot coordination. The proposed surface cover sensor as the tactile interface enables robots to detect accurate 3D force vector applied on various parts of the body during physical interaction with humans. First, after analysis of a variety of contact situations between humans and robots, tactile and force information needed are specified, and the specifications are decided based on knowledge of human engineering. Next, a design method of a cover sensor that can detect accurate force vector and contact position is described. The cover sensor utilizes a force-torque sensor and is surrounded with several touch sensors. The mechanism was implemented on a humanoid robot, WENDY. Finally, evaluation experiments of locus tracking on the surface and force-following to humans were carried out. The experimental results demonstrate the high capabilities of the proposed cover sensor as human-robot interface, and indicate that the proposed design method of whole-body tactile interface is capable of enhancing human-robot coordination.
---
paper_title: Physical interaction learning: Behavior adaptation in cooperative human-robot tasks involving physical contact

paper_content:

In order for humans and robots to engage in direct physical interaction several requirements have to be met. Among others, robots need to be able to adapt their behavior in order to facilitate the interaction with a human partner. This can be achieved using machine learning techniques. However, most machine learning scenarios to-date do not address the question of how learning can be achieved for tightly coupled, physical touch interactions between the learning agent and a human partner. This paper presents an example for such human in-the-loop learning scenarios and proposes a computationally cheap learning algorithm for this purpose. The efficiency of this method is evaluated in an experiment, where human care givers help an android robot to stand up.
---
paper_title: Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

paper_content:

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra's interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.
---
paper_title: Social Effects of Robot Therapy in a Care House - Change of Social Network of the Residents for Two Months

paper_content:

Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their subjective social network was analysed. In addition, the activities of the residents in public areas were recorded by video cameras during daytime hours (8:30-18:00) for over 2 months. Then, their social network was analysed from the video data objectively. The results showed that the density of the social networks was increased through interaction with the robots subjectively and objectively.
---
paper_title: A modularized sensitive skin for motion planning in uncertain environments

paper_content:

One way to avoid obstacles without modeling the environment is to use a sensor-based sensitive skin covering the body of the robot along with proper sensor-based motion planning algorithms. Compared to prior attempts, the system developed at the UW-Madison Robotics Lab and discussed here presents a system that can be easily reconfigured for a variety of applications. This is accomplished via modularized sensitive skin patches that can be connected in various ways, and a hierarchical control architecture that can be easily modified for various system configurations. In the implemented version, the skin contains about 1000 infrared sensors; it can be easily expanded, with minor changes. The system has been successfully tested in preliminary trials.
---
paper_title: A mobile autonomous humanoid assistant

paper_content:

A mobile autonomous humanoid robot is assisting human co-workers at the Johnson Space Center with tool handling tasks. This robot combines the upper body of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) / Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robonaut system with a Segway/spl trade/ robotic mobility platform yielding a dexterous, maneuverable humanoid perfect for aiding human co-workers in a range of environments. This system uses stereo vision to locate human teammates and tools and a navigation system that uses laser range and vision data to follow humans while avoiding obstacles. Tactile sensors provide information to grasping algorithms for efficient tool exchanges. The autonomous architecture utilizes these pre-programmed skills to form human assistant behaviors. The initial behavior demonstrates a robust capability to assist a human by acquiring a tool from a remotely located individual and then following the human in a cluttered environment with the tool for future use.
---
paper_title: The effects of robot touch and proactive behaviour on perceptions of human-robot interactions.

paper_content:

Despite robots' embodiment, the effect of physical contact or touch and its interaction with robots' autonomous behaviour has been a mostly overlooked aspect of human-robot interaction. This video-based, 2x2 between-subject survey experiment (N=119) found that touch and proactiveness interacted in their effects on perceived machine-likeness and dependability. Attitude towards robots in general also interacted with the effects of touch. Results show the value of further exploring the combination of physical aspects of human-robot interaction and proactiveness.
---
paper_title: The Body Surface as a Communication System: The State of the Art after 50 Years

paper_content:

The suggestion that the body surface might be used as an additional means of presenting information to human-machine operators has been around in the literature for nearly 50 years. Although recent technological advances have made the possibility of using the body as a receptive surface much more realistic, the fundamental limitations on the human information processing of tactile stimuli presented across the body surface are, however, still largely unknown. This literature review provides an overview of studies that have attempted to use vibrotactile interfaces to convey information to human operators. The importance of investigating any possible central cognitive limitations (i.e., rather than the peripheral limitations, such as related to sensory masking, that were typically addressed in earlier research) on tactile processing for the most effective design of body interfaces is highlighted. The applicability of the constraints emerging from studies of tactile processing under conditions of unisensory (i.e., purely tactile) stimulus presentation, to more ecologically valid conditions of multisensory stimulation, is also discussed. Finally, the results obtained from recent studies of tactile information processing under conditions of multisensory stimulation are described, and their implications for haptic/tactile interface design elucidated.
---
paper_title: Tactile interfaces: a state-of-the-art survey

paper_content:

Virtual reality techniques allow one to interact with synthetic worlds, i.e. virtual environments. Tactile feedback means conveying parameters such as roughness, rigidity, and temperature. These information and many others are obtained thanks to the sense of touch. Tactile feedback is of prime importance in many applications. In this paper we examine the state-of-the-art in tactile interfaces design. Thorough reviews of the literature reveal a significant amount of publications concerning tactile human- machine interfaces, especially onwards the ~1990. This paper reports the progress in tactile interfaces technology in the following areas: teleoperation, telepresence, sensory substitution, 3D surface generation, Braille systems, laboratory prototypes, and games. Different parameters and specifications required to generate and feed back tactile sensation are summarized.
---
paper_title: Robovie: An interactive humanoid robot

paper_content:

The authors have developed a robot called “Robovie” that has unique mechanisms designed for communication with humans. Robovie can generate human‐like behaviors by using human‐like actuators and vision and audio sensors. Software is a key element in the systems development. Two important ideas in human‐robot communication through research from the viewpoint of cognitive science have been obtained – one is importance of physical expressions using the body and the other is the effectiveness of the robot’s autonomy in the robot’s utterance recognition by humans. Based on these psychological experiments, a new architecture that generates episode chains in interactions with humans is developed. The basic structure of the architecture is a network of situated modules. Each module consists of elemental behaviors to entrain humans and a behavior for communicating with humans.
---
paper_title: A capacitance-based proximity sensor for whole arm obstacle avoidance

paper_content:

The authors address the issue of collision avoidance in unknown or partially modeled environments using a capacitative sensor. An eight channel capacitance-based sensor system which can detect obstacles up to 400 mm away has been developed. This sensor can detect both conductive and nonconductive obstacles of arbitrary color and shape. The sensor hardware was reliable and inexpensive, and may be fabricated using flexible printed circuit boards to provide whole-arm and joint protection for any robot or manipulator. Simple collision avoidance control algorithms have been implemented on a two-link robot arm. The sensor and control system enable the robot arm to avoid a conductive post and a concrete block. >
---
paper_title: Recognizing teleoperated manipulations

paper_content:

The many degrees-of-freedom and distributed sensing capability of dextrous robot hands permit the use of control programs that rely on qualitative changes in sensor feedback. One way of designing such a control program is to have the robot learn the qualitative control characteristics from examples. These examples may be provided via teleoperation. Results are presented for recognizing and segmenting manipulation primitives from a teleoperated task by analysis of features in sensor feedback. k-nearest quantized pattern vectors determine potential classifications. A hidden Markov model provides task context for the final segmentation. The illustrative task is picking up a plastic egg with a spatula. >
---
paper_title: Building an autonomous humanoid tool user

paper_content:

To make the transition from a technological curiosity to productive tools, humanoid robots will require key advances in many areas, including, mechanical design, sensing, embedded avionics, power, and navigation. Using the NASA Johnson Space Center's Robonaut as a testbed, the DARPA mobile autonomous robot software (MARS) humanoids team is investigating technologies that will enable humanoid robots to work effectively with humans and autonomously work with tools. A novel learning approach is being applied that enables the robot to learn both from a remote human teleoperating the robot and an adjacent human giving instruction. When the remote human performs tasks teleoperatively, the robot learns the salient sensory-motor features to executing the task. Once learned, the task may be carried out fusing the skills required to perform the task, guided by on-board sensing. The adjacent human takes advantage of previously learned skills to sequence the execution of these skills. Preliminary results from initial experiments using a drill to tighten lug nuts on a wheel are discussed.
---
paper_title: A tactile language for intuitive human-robot communication

paper_content:

This paper presents a tactile language for controlling a robot through its artificial skin. This language greatly improves the multimodal human-robot communication by adding both redundant and inherently new ways of robot control through the tactile mode. We defined an interface for arbitrary tactile sensors, implemented a symbol recognition for multi-finger contacts, and integrated that together with a freely available character recognition software into an easy-to-extend system for tactile language processing that can also incorporate and process data from non-tactile interfaces. The recognized tactile symbols allow for both a direct control of the robot's tool center point as well as abstract commands like ldquostoprdquo or ldquograsp object x with grasp type yrdquo. In addition to this versatility, the symbols are also extremely expressive since multiple parameters like direction, distance, and speed can be decoded from a single human finger stroke. Furthermore, our efficient symbol recognition implementation achieves real-time performance while being platform-independent. We have successfully used both a multi-touch finger pad and our artificial robot skin as tactile interfaces. The evaluation of our tactile language system was done using test persons that had to learn to language symbols, perform certain missions, and finally report on their experience using the NASA Task Load Index.
---

Title: A survey of Tactile Human–Robot Interactions

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Discuss the prevalence of robots in human environments and the importance of detecting and reasoning about human touch in various applications.

Section 2: Tactile detection
Description 2: Describe the broad field of tactile detection within robotics, detailing sensor devices and data analysis techniques used to detect human touch, and discuss different types of touch measurements extracted from sensors.

Section 3: Human-Robot Interaction
Description 3: Review the field of Human-Robot Interaction with a focus on applications that involve human touch, considering approaches motivated by safe operation, behavior execution, and behavior development.

Section 4: Tactile sensor feedback
Description 4: Explain mechanisms through which tactile feedback is detected and used within tactile HRI, categorizing the techniques based on sensor setup such as hard skins, soft skins, and skin alternatives.

Section 5: Hard skins
Description 5: Discuss the implementation and applications of hard, bumper-based skins, including the types of sensors used and the advantages and trade-offs of such skins.

Section 6: Soft skins
Description 6: Cover the implementation and applications of soft skins, detailing the types of sensors employed and the benefits and challenges associated with flexible substrates.

Section 7: Alternatives to skin-based approaches
Description 7: Explore approaches that do not use skin coverings for tactile sensors, including the use of force/torque sensors within robot joints and individual or array-based surface sensors.

Section 8: Physical human-robot interactions
Description 8: Present the different forms of physical human-robot interactions, classifying them into categories of interactions that interfere with, contribute to, or enable the development of robot behaviors.

Section 9: Interactions that interfere with robot behavior execution
Description 9: Discuss physical interactions that interfere with robot tasks, focusing on approaches to detect and recover from such interactions for safe robot operation.

Section 10: Interactions that contribute to behavior execution
Description 10: Explain interactions that are a necessary element of robot behavior execution, describing how human touch is used to guide robot behavior and convey information.

Section 11: Interactions that develop robot behavior
Description 11: Describe how human-robot interactions are used to build and adapt robot behaviors, emphasizing learning from human touch for behavior development.

Section 12: Discussion
Description 12: Summarize current trends in tactile HRI, identify the intersection of advanced tactile detection and HRI work, and highlight open areas for future research.

Section 13: Overview and categorization
Description 13: Provide a summary and categorization of tactile detection techniques and the use of detected information in HRI applications.

Section 14: The intersection of tactile sensing and HRI
Description 14: Discuss the overlap between tactile sensing and human-robot interactions, identifying state-of-the-art applications and suitable sensors for different HRI categories.

Section 15: Areas open for future research
Description 15: Identify open areas for future research within tactile HRI, focusing on unexpected interactions, interpretation of human intentions, and human-guided behavior development.

Section 16: Directions within tactile sensing
Description 16: Outline key directions for future tactile sensing research, emphasizing continuous coverage, multi-modal sensing, and biological inspiration.

Section 17: Scope of this review
Description 17: Define the scope of the review, highlighting topics included and excluded, focusing on applications that detect human touch within HRI.

Section 18: Conclusion
Description 18: Conclude the survey with a discussion on the importance of tactile detection in HRI and a summary of the framework used to categorize tactile HRI research.