A study on the use of tactile instructions for developing robots motions
Developing motions for humanoid robots is time consuming. However, sport and dance instructors can easily adjust their students postures by simple touches. This suggests the possibility of exploiting touch for motion development, and allows us to propose a methodology based on this concept. To realize such a system, it is required to define how the robot should interpret touches. We propose a supervised learning approach to cope with this issue, and verify its feasibility experimentally. We then study the data collected by the algorithm, and show that the system is practical both for motion development and for studying human-robot tactile communication. In particular, we present considerations on the sparsity that characterize the whole process and suggest how sparsity can be exploited for efficient interpretation of tactile instructions.
humanoid robot touch tactile communication humanrobot interaction