Development of a Handshake Robot System for Embodied Interaction with Humans

It is expected that robots will play an important role in social welfare and service for the older citizens. These robots should display an emotional aspect to make them more acceptable to humans. Humans shake hands in order to greet each other and display a feeling of closeness. A handshake is the embodied interaction with contact by which humans can directly share embodied rhythms. In this paper, we develop a handshake robot system for embodied interaction. The robot can generate the handshake approaching motion that is acceptable to human emotion by using secondary delay elements from the trajectory of a human hand. The effectiveness of this handshake robot is demonstrated by sensory evaluation