Towards the Development of Kansei Haptic Sensing Technology for Robot Application – Exploring Human Haptic Emotion

Nowadays, many robots are involved in human daily life with the intention that they can assist humans in various tasks. Therefore, humans and robot interaction is crucial. However, currently robots are only able to communicate with humans due to physical interaction without any emotion or feeling. In this day and age, robots without emotions are similar to decision makers without passion. So, robots should be provided with the capability to feel the surface of any objects that they are holding. In order to develop robots that can feel or robots that have emotions like humans do, it is important for us to first study human emotions in conjunction with roughness, vibration or even temperature. It is believed that the findings are able to be used as a guidance in robot development. This paper is focusing on the roughness factor. A series of experiment where the kansei survey method was conducted and applied that required a number of participants to touch some surfaces and answer those questions in the survey based on what they feel about having interaction with the surfaces. This paper describes the results of these findings of how humans feel against touching surfaces.