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Pleasant touching is an important aspect of social interactions that is widely used as a caregiving technique. To address the problems resulting from a lack of available human caregivers, previous research has attempted to develop robots that can perform this kind of pleasant touch. However, it remains unclear whether robots can provide such a pleasant touch in a manner similar to humans. To investigate this issue, we compared the effect of the speed of gentle strokes on the back between human and robot agents on the emotional responses of human participants (n = 28). A robot or a human stroked on the participants' back at two different speeds (i.e., 2.6 and 8.5 cm/s). The participants' subjective (valence and arousal ratings) and physiological (facial electromyography (EMG) recorded from the corrugator supercilii and zygomatic major muscles and skin conductance response) emotional reactions were measured. The subjective ratings demonstrated that the speed of 8.5 cm/s was more pleasant and arousing than the speed of 2.6 cm/s for both human and robot strokes. The corrugator supercilii EMG showed that the speed of 8.5 cm/s resulted in reduced activity in response to both human and robot strokes. These results demonstrate similar speed-dependent modulations of stroke on subjective and physiological positive emotional responses across human and robot agents and suggest that robots can provide a pleasant touch similar to that of humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since home appliances support various human activities in the household, service robots are expected to also use home appliances to perform the same tasks. We assume that most home appliances consist of a rigid cabinet with a few operating parts. Hence, our research question is if each service robot has its own set of motion primitives to handle each operating part, the robots can use common knowledge to perform those operations. In this paper, we propose a task execution framework for robot-agnostic home appliance operations. The proposed framework consists of three aspects. First, we provide a set of the minimum required motion primitives to handle operating parts to each robot arm. Second, we use ontology to represent knowledge of how to operate home appliances. Third, we provide a graphical user interface (GUI) to construct and edit an ontology. In the experiments, we verified the applicability of the proposed framework with three types of conditions: (1) a simulation and/or a real environment, (2) a few types of home appliances, and (3) three types of robot arms. Furthermore, through these experiments, we also verified that the proposed framework could execute a sequential task to operate home appliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate which approach to generate eye behaviors using an android robot makes what impressions on humans and clarify which are the important factors for attractive eye behaviors. Thus, we evaluate the human impression of eye behaviors displayed by an android robot while talking to a human by comparing the motions generated by the two approaches. In the first approach, we develop a method to imitate human eye behavior obtained from eye trackers. In the second approach, we control the eye direction, eye-contact duration, and eyeblinks based on the findings of human eye behavior in psychology and cognitive research. In the experiments, we asked male and female subjects to evaluate their impression by comparing the eye behaviors with an android that controls the eye-contact duration and eyeblinks by editing the imitation parameters or the rule-based behavior. In the experiments, we asked subjects to evaluate their impression of different eye behaviors displayed by an android. The eye behaviors were generated by modifying the imitation parameters or the rule-based behavior, which resulted in different eye-contact duration and eyeblink duration and timing. From the results, we found that (1) the imitation and rule-based behaviors showed no difference in terms of human-likeness, (2) the 3-second eye contact obtained better scores regardless of the imitation or rule-based eye behavior, (3) the subjects might regard the long eyeblinks as voluntary eyeblinks, with the intention to break eye contact, and (4) female subjects preferred short eyeblinks rather than long ones and considered that short eyeblinks might be one of the keys to making eye contact more suitable, in contrast to male subjects who preferred long eyeblinks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]