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Interpretation of Social Touch on an Artificial Arm Covered with an EIT-based Sensitive Skin

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Abstract

During social interaction humans extract important information from tactile stimuli that improves their understanding of the interaction. The development of a similar capacity in a robot will contribute to the future success of intuitive human–robot interactions. This paper presents experiments on the classification of social touch on a full-sized mannequin arm covered with touch-sensitive artificial skin. The flexible and stretchable sensitive skin was implemented using electrical impedance tomography. A classifier based on the LogitBoost algorithm was used to classify six emotions and six social messages transmitted by humans when touching the artificial arm. Experimental results show that classification of social touch can be achieved with accuracies comparable to those achieved by humans.

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Notes

  1. The word modality is often used in the term “sensory modality” to refer to a specific sense (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.). Our usage of “touch modality” here is consistent with that previously used in [26, 30] and [62], for example.

  2. WEKA is a widely-used [13, 42], Java-based, open source data mining environment developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

  3. Obtained from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ and http://oxforddictionaries.com/

  4. The semantically non-exclusive labels “Catholic,” “Christian” and “Protestant” occurred through self-reporting of religion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Creative Robotics Lab, National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW,  2021, Australia

    David Silvera-Tawil & Mari Velonaki

  2. Centre for Social Robotics, Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW,  2006, Australia

    David Rye

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  1. David Silvera-Tawil
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  2. David Rye
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  3. Mari Velonaki
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Correspondence to David Silvera-Tawil.

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This work was supported in part by the ARC Centres of Excellence programme funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the New South Wales State Government and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney.

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Silvera-Tawil, D., Rye, D. & Velonaki, M. Interpretation of Social Touch on an Artificial Arm Covered with an EIT-based Sensitive Skin. Int J of Soc Robotics 6, 489–505 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0223-x

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