The Importance of Teaching Robots to Hug

Hugs make us feel warm and safe and comforted and loved. If we need a hug and another human isn't available, we can sometimes get a little bit of satisfaction from hugging inanimate objects like stuffed animals, but it seems like robots (that can hypothetically hug us back) might be able to be somewhat more fulfilling. While we've seen robots that are actively huggable before, and even a few that can hug you back, it's not clear exactly how a robot hug compares to a human hug, and whether hugging a robot can confer any of the benefits that we get from hugging people. At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) earlier this year, Alexis E. Block and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker from the Haptic Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, presented a paper on "Emotionally Supporting Humans Through Robot Hugs." Their work explores how robots can be more effectively designed and taught to give the kinds of hugs that humans will love.