Title
Soft skin texture modulation for social robotics
Abstract
Robots designed for social interaction often express their internal and emotional states through nonverbal behavior. In most systems, this is achieved using facial expressions, gestures, locomotion, and tone of voice. In this paper, we propose a new expressive nonverbal channel for social robots in the form of a texture-changing skin. Our approach is inspired by biological systems, which frequently display their internal states through skin texture change. We present two designs for soft fluidic Texture Units (TU): goosebumps and spikes, and a design for an interleaved TU array that can function as an expressive social robot skin. We discuss fabrication, actuation, and control considerations, as well as a framework for mapping emotional states to texture changes. We exemplify the design in a social robot which has both a screen-projected face and the proposed texture-changing expressive skin.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ROBOSOFT.2018.8404917
2018 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
soft skin texture modulation,social robotics,social interaction,emotional states,nonverbal behavior,facial expressions,biological systems,expressive social robot skin,gestures,locomotion,voice tone,soft fluidic texture units,goosebumps,spikes,interleaved TU array,fabrication,actuation,mapping,screen projected face,texture changing expressive skin
Conference
978-1-5386-4517-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.42
20
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yuhan Hu130.77
Zhengnan Zhao220.42
Abheek Vimal320.42
Guy Hoffman470662.08