Can I Pet Your Robot? Incorporating Capacitive Touch Sensing into a Soft Socially Assistive Robot Platform

Abstract-- This work presents a method of incorporating lowcost capacitive tactile sensors on a soft socially assistive robot platform. By embedding conductive thread into the robot's crocheted exterior, we formed a set of low-cost, flexible capacitive tactile sensors that do not disrupt the robot's soft, zoomorphic embodiment. We evaluated the sensors' performance through a user study (N=20) and found that the sensors reliably detected user touch events and localized touch inputs to one of three regions on the robot's exterior. Touch plays an important role in human-human and human-animal social interactions, but it is not often utilized in social interactions between humans and robots. Most Flexibility and Cohesiveness Sensors should be easy to reconfigure commercially available platforms for robotics research do for different interaction contexts without disrupting not incorporate tactile sensing, and those that do cannot Blossom's soft, handcrafted embodiment. In this work, we propose and A. Physical Device Design evaluate a method of incorporating low-cost capacitive tactile We embedded conductive thread into the crocheted exterior sensors onto the Blossom open-source soft robot platform [1] to enable Blossom to detect touch from the user.