Huggy Pajama: Remote Hug System for Family Communication

Touch is a quintessential expression of love and intimacy. It comprises a large part of non-verbal human communication, and plays a signification role in conveying emotions, building relationship bonds, and improving mental and physical well-being. A major technical challenge in making robots and virtual characters that interact with humans on a physical and emotional level is mutual robotic touch. Novel touch sensing and actuation systems need to be developed in order to endow such digital partners with this emotional sense. This chapter presents an early work of a series of projects on digital touch we have been working on in our lab over the last ten years or so. Huggy Pajama is a remote hugging communication system that allows family members to hug each other over the Internet. The input interface is a small, mobile device that measures human touch force, whereas the output interface is a wearable jacket with embedded pneumatic actuators for force actuation. The results of this work made it possible to substantiate the development of subsequent robotic touch communication systems.