Does A Robot’s Touch Encourage Human Effort?

The paper investigated the effects on a person being touched by a robot to motivate her. Human science literature has shown that touches to others facilitate efforts of touched people. On the other hand, in the human–robot interaction research field, past research has failed to focus on the effects of such touches from robots to people. A few studies reported negative impressions from people, even if a touch from a person to a robot left a positive impression. To reveal whether robot touch positively affects humans, we conducted an experiment where a robot requested participants to perform a simple and monotonous task with/without touch interaction between a robot and participants. Our experiment’s result showed that both touches from the robot to the participants and touches from the participants to the robot facilitated their efforts.

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