Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human-Robot Interaction

Published July 14, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2607.11690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing for social-physical human-robot interaction (spHRI) is designed in a hardware-driven manner, where predefined sensor configurations constrain coverage, spatial resolution, and the range of recognizable gestures. We propose a requirement-driven framework that derives sensing requirements, specifically spatial resolution and placement, directly from interaction data. Using a VR-based platform with haptic feedback, we collected high-resolution whole-body contact distributions across multiple social scenarios, from which we identified nine recurring social touch gestures. Eight gestures were selected for controlled data collection with 18 participants, yielding an open-source dataset of 5,520 trials. Analysis of contact distributions and simulated tactile encodings provides quantitative baselines for skin coverage and sensor density on a humanoid robot platform. While demonstrated on a single robot platform, the methodology is designed to be transferable to other robot morphologies, potentially enabling morphology-specific sensing requirements to be derived prior to hardware fabrication.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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