Developing furry robots that can detect and respond to emotional touch requires soft touch sensors and gesture detection algorithms. We developed a fabric touch sensor and a system that could detect different touches—like pats, scratches, and tickles.
Related academic publications
>X. L. Cang, P. Bucci, J. Rantala and K. E. MacLean, “Discerning Affect From Touch and Gaze During Interaction With a Robot Pet,” in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 1598-1612, 1 April-June 2023, doi: 10.1109/TAFFC.2021.3094894
> Cang, X. L., Bucci, P., Strang, Allen, J., MacLean, K. E., and Liu, H. Y. S., “Different Strokes and Different Folks: Economical Dynamic Surface Sensing and Affect-Related Touch Recognition.” In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ’15). ACM, Seattle, WA, USA, Nov 2015, pp. 147-154.