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Does A Robot’s Touch Encourage Human Effort?

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Abstract

The paper investigated the effects on a person being touched by a robot to motivate her. Human science literature has shown that touches to others facilitate efforts of touched people. On the other hand, in the human–robot interaction research field, past research has failed to focus on the effects of such touches from robots to people. A few studies reported negative impressions from people, even if a touch from a person to a robot left a positive impression. To reveal whether robot touch positively affects humans, we conducted an experiment where a robot requested participants to perform a simple and monotonous task with/without touch interaction between a robot and participants. Our experiment’s result showed that both touches from the robot to the participants and touches from the participants to the robot facilitated their efforts.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (A) Number 15H05322.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Robotics and Communication Labs., ATR, 2-2-2 Hikaridai Keihanna-Sci. City, Kyoto, Japan

    Masahiro Shiomi, Kazuhiko Shinozawa, Reo Matsumura, Hiroshi Ishiguro & Norihiro Hagita

  2. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Kayako Nakagawa & Reo Matsumura

Authors
  1. Masahiro Shiomi
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  2. Kayako Nakagawa
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  3. Kazuhiko Shinozawa
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  4. Reo Matsumura
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  5. Hiroshi Ishiguro
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  6. Norihiro Hagita
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masahiro Shiomi.

Additional information

This paper is an extended version of a previous work of Nakagawa et. al. [1] and contains additional experimental results and more detailed discussions.

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Shiomi, M., Nakagawa, K., Shinozawa, K. et al. Does A Robot’s Touch Encourage Human Effort?. Int J of Soc Robotics 9, 5–15 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0339-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0339-x

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