Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human-Robot Interaction

2026-07-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of existing social touch sensing designs, which often rely on predefined configurations and lack empirical grounding for coverage of diverse touch behaviors and spatial layout. The authors propose a需求-driven design paradigm, leveraging a virtual reality platform with haptic feedback to collect full-body social touch data across multiple scenarios. Through high-resolution contact analysis and user studies, they identify nine common social touch gestures and release an open-source dataset comprising 5,520 interactions. Building on this empirical foundation, the study provides the first quantitative guidelines for tactile skin coverage and sensor density required on humanoid robots, establishing transferable design benchmarks applicable to robots of varying morphologies.

Abstract

Tactile sensing for social-physical human-robot interaction (spHRI) is designed in a hardware-driven manner, where predefined sensor configurations constrain coverage, spatial resolution, and the range of recognizable gestures. We propose a requirement-driven framework that derives sensing requirements, specifically spatial resolution and placement, directly from interaction data. Using a VR-based platform with haptic feedback, we collected high-resolution whole-body contact distributions across multiple social scenarios, from which we identified nine recurring social touch gestures. Eight gestures were selected for controlled data collection with 18 participants, yielding an open-source dataset of 5,520 trials. Analysis of contact distributions and simulated tactile encodings provides quantitative baselines for skin coverage and sensor density on a humanoid robot platform. While demonstrated on a single robot platform, the methodology is designed to be transferable to other robot morphologies, potentially enabling morphology-specific sensing requirements to be derived prior to hardware fabrication.

Problem

• social-physical human-robot interaction
• tactile sensing
• sensor coverage
• spatial resolution
• social touch gestures

Innovation

• requirement-driven design
• social touch gestures
• whole-body tactile sensing
• virtual human-robot interaction
• sensor placement optimization