Towards a novel generation of haptic and robotic interfaces: Integrating affective physiology in human-robot interaction

Haptic interfaces are special robots that interact
with people to convey touch-related information. In addition to
such a discriminative aspect, touch is also a highly emotionrelated
sense. However, while a lot of effort has been spent to
investigate the perceptual mechanisms of discriminative touch
and to suitably replicate them through haptic systems in human
robot interaction (HRI), there is still a lot of work to do
in order to take into account also the emotional aspects of
tactual experience (i.e., the so-called affective haptics), for a
more naturalistic human-robot communication. In this paper,
we report evidences on how a haptic device designed to
convey caress-like stimuli can influence physiological measures
related to the autonomous nervous system (ANS), which is intimately
connected to evoked emotions in humans. Specifically,
a discriminant role of electrodermal response and heart rate
variability can be associated to two different caressing velocities,
which can also be linked to two different levels of pleasantness.
Finally, we discuss how the results from this study could be
profitably employed and generalized to pave the path