Touch-based information transfer from a robot modeled on the hearing dog

Research on physical human-robot interaction has been attracting attention recently, focusing on robot embodiment. The work reported here proposes Active Touch Communication Robot (AcToR), a robot that is modeled on the hearing dog. A hearing dog is a type of dog assist people who are deaf or hard of hearing by alerting their handler to important sounds. AcToR uses the sense of touch to notify a human of the intention to transfer information. For example, when AcToR detects that a cell phone that is in another location has received a call, AcToR moves to the user´s location and makes contact with the user´s body to notify the user of the incoming call. The AcToR robot is based on the Roomba®and uses the Roomba´s bumper and contact sensors to detect contact. This paper reports the results of psychological experiments using the AcToR robot that indicate the feasibility of using touch to transfer information from a robot to a person.