Physical Interaction for Social Robots

By Katsu Yamane

Honda Research Institute, USA

The major communication modalities used by social robots have been speech, gesture, and facial expression, which do not involve direct physical contact between the robot and human. Furthermore, in most interactions there is a clearly defined piece of information that the robot wants to convey to the human. In social human-human interactions, however, more subtle information such as emotion and personality is often exchanged, sometimes through direct physical contacts. This talk highlights two ongoing projects in socially-aware physical human-robot interaction. The first project investigates how people perceive a mobile robot exhibiting different collision avoidance behaviors. Through nearly 500 human-robot crossing experiments in a controlled lab setting, we obtain statistically significant subjective and objective data on perceived safety and comfort of those behaviors, which serve as guidelines for designing motion planning algorithms for robots navigating in crowded environments. In the second project, we explore direct physical contact as a new modality for conveying emotion and personality. Despite the fact that we often observe (to our fear) people spontaneously touching robots that are not designed for direct contact with humans, this modality has rarely been used in social robots. I will describe the hardware platform and controller developed for human-robot hugging, and discuss its potential applications in the social robotics context.

Bio

Dr. Katsu Yamane is a Senior Scientist at Honda Research Institute USA. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering in 1997, 1999, and 2002 respectively from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Prior to joining Honda in 2018, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research, an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, and a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Yamane is a recipient of King-Sun Fu Best Transactions Paper Award and Early Academic Career Award from IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and Young Scientist Award from Ministry of Education, Japan. His research interests include physical human-robot interaction, humanoid robot control and motion synthesis, character animation, and human motion simulation.