Don’t Touch Me There! Comfortability with Robot Touch Across Different Roles and Settings

Grace Pan, Gurnoor Kaur, Patricia Alves-Oliveira

Type: An evaluation-centric paper (focused on advancing methods and ideas for robot evaluation)

Keywords: Human-robot interaction, comfortability, physical touch, robot embodiment

TL;DR: Comfortability with robot touch across robot roles and embodiments.

Abstract: Physical human-robot interaction is an evolving field that explores the role of robotic touch and its effects on human perception, trust, and comfort. Our study investigates how comfortability with robot touch varies across five roles (future of work, domestic life, romantic partnership, medical care, and education/culture) and five robot embodiments (mechanical, humanoid, animal-inspired, android, and functional). By using narrative vignettes and body-mapping tasks, we found differences in touch comfortability, with medical and romantic partner robots eliciting the highest comfort levels. We also discovered gender differences, with males reporting greater comfort across all robot roles. Notably, participants preferred the animal-inspired embodiment and also consistently indicated higher comfortability with imagined human touch compared to robot touch. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating robot touch within diverse social contexts and embodiments, offering insights for designing socially acceptable touch interactions that generalize to real-world HRI applications.

Submission Number: 14