How do People Expect Humanoids to Respond to Touch?

With close interaction between humans and robots expected to become more and more frequent in the near future, tactile interaction is receiving increasing interest. Many advances were made in the fields of tactile sensing and touch classification. Robot’s reactions to touches are usually decided by the robot’s designers and fit to a particular purpose. However, very little investigation has been directed to the movements that common people expect from robots being touched. This paper provides an initial step in this direction. Responses that people expect from a humanoid being touched were collected. These responses were then classified by automatically grouping similar responses. This allows the identification of distinct types of responses. Evaluation of how this grouping matches common sense were then performed. Results showed strong correlation between the automatic grouping and common sense, providing support to the idea that the automatically identified types of responses correspond to a plausible classification of robot’s responses to touch.