Tactile interaction plays a crucial role in interactions between people. Touch can, for example, help people calm down and lower physiological stress responses. Consequently, it is believed that tactile and haptic interaction matter also in human-robot interaction. We study if the intensity of the tactile interaction has an impact on people, and do so by studying whether different intensities of tactile interaction modulate physiological measures and task performance. We use a paradigm in which a small humanoid robot is used to encourage risk-taking behaviour, relying on peer encouragement to take more risks which might lead to a higher pay-off, but potentially also to higher losses. For this, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) is used as a proxy for the propensity to take risks. We study four conditions, one control condition in which the task is completed without a robot, and three experimental conditions in which a robot is present that encourages risk-taking behaviour with different degrees of tactile interaction. The results show that both low-intensity and high-intensity tactile interaction increase people's risk-taking behaviour. However, low-intensity tactile interaction increases comfort and lowers stress, whereas high-intensity touch does not.

Many people fear the rise in automation may result in lower employment but that may not always be the case. According to new research, firms who were quick to add robots to their manufacturing also saw a rise in employees. "When you look at use of robots at the firm level, it is really interesting because there is an additional dimension," said study co-author and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. "We know firms are adopting robots in order to reduce their costs, so it is quite plausible that firms adopting robots early are going to expand at the expense of their competitors whose costs are not going down. And that's exactly what we find." The study revealed that although a 20 percentage point increase in robot use from 2010 to 2015 led to a 3.2% decrease in employment, for firms adopting robots, employee hours actually increased by 10.9% and wages rose as well.

Greater performance accuracy is implicit in the evolution of robot intelligence, says Fanuc Robotics' Dick Johnson, general manager, material handling. "For example, there is a trend to offer tools that will increase the accuracy of robots by compensating for variations in the manufacturing process. That promises to both decrease robot programming time and also make possible new robot applications."

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