Haptic Communication Between Humans and Robots

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.