Start Year
2013
End Year
2017

The CuddleBot is a cat-sized social-robot research platform that lets us explore how touch interactions affect stress and anxiety mitigation. Custom built by SPIN researchers, CuddleBot can move its head, arch its back, purr, and change how it "breathes". It is equipped with a full-body, flexible fabric pressure sensitive touch sensor; its current gesture recognition system enables users to connect sensed gestures and response behaviours.

The CuddleBot's therapeutic platform is inspired by the TAMER project and uses touch sensing for user behaviour recognition.

SPIN People
Soheil Kianzad
Laura Cang
Paul Bucci
Andrew Strang
Michael Phan-Ba
Jeff Allen
Meghana Venkataswamy
Mario Cimet
Publications
Sefidgar, Y., "TAMER: Touch-guided Anxiety Management via Engagement with a Robotic Pet: Efficacy Evaluation and the First Steps of Interaction Design,", M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012.
Allen, J., Cang, L., Phan-Ba, M., Strang, A., and MacLean, K.E., “Introducing the CuddleBot: A Robot That Responds to Touch Gestures,” in Proc. of ACM/IEEE Int'l Conf on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) - Demo, Portland, 2015.
Tags
affect
emotion detection
human-robot interaction
interaction design
rendering emotion
fur
robot design
therapy robot
touch sensing
user experience