Affective Touch in Social Robots

Abstract

Social robotics asks people to be physically and psychologically intimate with robots. Of all the senses, touch is most associated with intimacy and the material qualities of contact readily morph into psychological ones. To see how these intricacies of touch are present but not always fully articulated in research into tactility in social robots, this paper firstly considers two sets of research in tactile robotics, one examining touch in an anthropomorphic robot and the other in an innovative, partially zoomorphic robot. While such research can be criticised for functionalising and quantifying touch, this is not an exhaustive understanding of the incorporation of affective touch in social robotics. Alongside functional and quantifying processes (and not necessarily in opposition to them) are novel and rich imaginative ones, often driven by low-tech materials. These dimensions of affective touch are more often articulated in discussions of robotic, cinematic, tactile and media art that consider the perceptual style of touch to be multivalent, imaginative and mobile. This perspective can contribute to articulating the dynamics of affective touch in social robotics, allowing for the recognition of the importance of the low-tech, material features that are a noteworthy part of touching robots. The ambiguities and indeterminacies of affective touch, messy materialism and the interactivity of affect interweave with high-tech computational practices in generating the experience of touching social robots.