Does A Robot's Touch Encourage Human Effort?

The paper investigated the effects on a person being touched by a robot to motivate her. Human science literature has shown that touches to others facilitate efforts of touched people. On the other hand, in the human-robot interaction research field, past research has failed to focus on the effects of such touches from robots to people. A few studies reported negative impressions from people, even if a touch from a person to a robot left a positive impression. To reveal whether robot touch positively affects humans, we conducted an experiment where a robot requested participants to perform a simple and monotonous task with/without touch interaction between a robot and participants. Our experiment's result showed that both touches from the robot to the participants and touches from the participants to the robot facilitated their efforts.