Physical touch is one of the most important channels of interpersonal communication, but we barely notice the haptic clues in our daily lives. The study of robot-human affective interaction has primarily focused on facial expressions and vocal interactions, but not touch.

What if the robots being developed today and in the future had the ability to express their emotions to humans through physical contact?

Could it be possible for humans to understand robots’ emotions through haptic interactions?

EmotiTactor is a research experiment that aims to improve the emotional expressiveness of the robot. A robotic interface is constructed to perform haptic stimulations for primary emotions through a series of machine tactors (tactile organs).

Publication:
EmotiTactor: Emotional Expression of Robotic Physical Contact is accepted for publication and presentation in the Provocations and Work in Progress track for the 2020 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’20)