At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) earlier this year, 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.
The research presented at HRI is an attempt to figure some of this out, by conducting a study where participants hugged a specially modified PR2 named HuggieBot.