Walter Dan Stiehl

Design of a therapeutic robotic companion for relational, affective touch

Much research has shown the positive health benefits of companion animals. Unfortunately these animals are not always available to patients due to allergies, risk of disease, or other reasons. Recently, this application domain has attracted attention of robotics researchers. The Huggable is a new type of robotic companion capable of active relational and affective touch-based interactions with a person. It features a high number of somatic sensors (electric field, temperature, and force) over the entire surface of the robot, underneath a soft silicons skin and fur fabric covering. This paper describes the design and early results in recognizing affective content of touch for this robot.

Affective touch for robotic companions

As robotic platforms are designed for human robot interaction applications, a full body sense of touch, or “sensitive skin,” becomes important. The Huggable is a new type of therapeutic robotic companion based upon relational touch interactions. The initial use of neural networks to classify the affective content of touch is described.

The huggable: a platform for research in robotic companions for pediatric care

Robotic companions offer a unique combination of embodiment and computation which open many new interesting opportunities in the field of pediatric care. As these new technologies are developed, we must consider the central research questions of how such systems should be designed and what the appropriate applications for such systems are. In this paper we present the Huggable, a robotic companion in the form factor of a teddy bear and outline a series of studies we are planning to run using the Huggable in a pediatric care unit.

Real-time social touch gesture recognition for sensate robots

This paper describes the hardware and algorithms for a realtime social touch gesture recognition system. Early experiments involve a Sensate Bear test-rig with full body touch sensing, sensor visualization and gesture recognition capabilities. Algorithms are based on real humans interacting with a plush bear. In developing a preliminary gesture library with thirteen Symbolic Gestures and eight Touch Subtypes, we have taken the first steps toward a Robotic Touch API, showing that the Huggable robot behavior system will be able to stream currently active sensors to detect regional social gestures and local sub-gestures in realtime. The system demonstrates the infrastructure to detect three types of touching: social touch, local touch, and sensor-level touch.

The design of a semi-autonomous robot avatar for family communication and education

Robots as an embodied, multi-modal technology have great potential to be used as a new type of communication device. In this paper we outline our development of the Huggable robot as a semi-autonomous robot avatar for two specific types of remote interaction - family communication and education. Through our discussion we highlight how we have applied six important elements in our system to allow for the robot to function as a richly embodied communication channel.

Semi-Autonomous Robot Avatar as a Medium for Family Communication and Education

Robots as an embodied, multi-modal technology have great potential to be used as a new type of communication device. In this paper we outline our development of the Huggable robot as a semi-autonomous robot avatar for two specific types of remote interaction — family communication and education. We also describe three different operator control interfaces (Web Interface, Wearable Interface and Sympathetic Interface) being developed to explore how these systems will impact the experience. Furthermore, through our discussion we highlight how we have applied five important elements in our system to allow the robot to function as a richly embodied communication channel. These five elements include sharing and directing attention, situational awareness through real-time sensor feedback, alleviating the cognitive load of a user, conveying the personality and character of the robot and global accessibility. Lastly, we provide results from a pilot study of the Web Interface.

The huggable: a new type of therapeutic robotic companion

Much research has shown the many positive benefits of companion animal therapy in improving the lives of people in hospitals and nursing home facilities (Allen, Blascovich et al. 1991). Unfortunately, in many facilities companion animal therapy is not offered due to fears of allergies, bites, or disease. Even in facilities that do offer this form of therapy, it is only offered for a few hours each day once or twice a week with a trained professional present at all times. As a response to these restrictions robot assisted therapy, using robots such as Sony’s AIBO and the Paro (Wada, Shibata et al. 2002) has emerged for cases in which companion animals are not available. These current robotic companions lack a full body sense of touch capable of understanding the relational and affective content provided to the robot, such as if the robot is held in someone’s arms, tickled, or petted. These aspects of touch are one of the ways in which companion animals provide comfort.