Effect of Humanoid Robot's Reaction on Human Touch to Robot

We have investigated the effect on the human feeling of a small humanoid robot's response to a human touch on the robot. Conventional studies revealed the importance of human social touch with the robot, however, few studies have examined the effect of how the robot responds to human touch on a robot. This paper focuses on the changes of human impressions to the robot when the robot responds to human touches, e.g., hitting, holding, and stroking the robot. To explore this, we conducted an experiment in which a small humanoid robot interacts with humans using a tactile sensor attached to its upper arm and responds to human touches, for example, hitting, holding, and stroking the upper arm, with body movements, voice, gaze movements, and LED lights of the eyes. We investigated whether the robot's reaction and the gaze movement contribute to the impression of the human subjects. We found that the robot's response changed the human impression by comparing the interactions without the robot's response, while the presence and absence of the eye contact by a gaze control were not effective in the human impression. Also, the result shows that people had a better impression on the condition with a robot's response than that without the robot's response.