タッチケアロボットのエンドエフェクタにおける接触面積・分布と快感情の関係

抄録

Affective touch enables to relieve stress and pain. If robots can perform affective touch, they would support the patients who cannot receive enough care from therapists. In developing robots for touch care, it is important to develop an end-effector that can evoke pleasant feelings as much as or more than a human hand. In this study, we hypothesize that the feeling is changed by the variety of the contact area between an end-effector and the human body. Then we develop a simple and reconfigurable end-effector consisting of a plate and flexible or rigid joint parts. Its simpleness contributes to its productivity and we prepared and compared three end-effectors having different contact areas using its reconfigurableness. In the experiments, we evaluated 1) the contact area of the three end-effectors quantitatively, and 2) the difference in a person’s valence and arousal when touched by the end-effectors subjectively. The results suggest that 1) the end-effectors with flexible joints have a larger contact area than the end-effector with rigid joints, and 2) the end-effector with a larger contact area give lower arousal values and higher valence than the end-effector without enough contact area.