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Abstract: Hugs are one of the first forms of contact and affection humans experience. Receiving a hug is one of the best ways to feel socially supported, and the lack of social touch can have detrimental effects on an individual's well-being. However, hugs are complex affective interactions that are easy to get wrong because they need to adapt to the approach, height, body shape, and preferences of the hugging partner, and they often include intra-hug gestures like squeezes. We created HuggieBot, a hugging robot, to better understand the intricacies of close social-physical human-robot interaction and as a stepping stone to providing emotional support. Through the iterative design process of creating HuggieBot, we developed 11 tenets of robotic hugging, which ensure a robot can provide its partner with a high-quality embrace. These guidelines can be abstracted to designing other robots to enable new possibilities.
Bio: Alexis E. Block is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, where she directs the SaPHaRI Lab, which focuses on social-physical human-robot interaction. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, supported by a prestigious NSF-funded Computing Innovations Fellowship. She received her Dr. sc. from ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in 2021. She was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society for outstanding scientific achievement by a junior scientist, and she won the “Best Hands-On Demonstration” award at EuroHaptics 2022. Her research has garnered significant media attention and was featured in The New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR), MIT Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Nature Outlook, and many others. She received her M.S.E. in Robotics and her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 and 2016, respectively.
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