Qiaoqiao Ren wins best paper award at the International Conference on Social Robotics

Qiaoqiao Ren received the Best Paper Award at the 16th International Conference on Social Robotics ICSR2024 for her research on “Conveying Emotions to Robots through Touch and Sound.” ICSR, hosted this year in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a key gathering for researchers and practitioners in the field of human-robot interaction, focusing on the social integration of intelligent robots into human environments.

In her award-winning paper, Qiaoqiao examines the consistency of touch-based emotional expressions directed at robots, utilising the integration of tactile and auditory sensing modalities to capture affective haptic cues. This interdisciplinary research leveraged the piezoresistive pressure sensor developed by Remko Proesmans from our team, combined with a microphone, to effectively simulate the dual channels of touch and sound.

The study involved 28 participants, each of whom expressed ten distinct emotions through spontaneous touch gestures on a robot. The findings demonstrated a statistically significant consistency in emotional expression among participants, underscoring the potential for robots to reliably interpret human affective states through multimodal sensory input. Her future work focuses on conveying emotions and gestures back to people through multiple modalities, including vibrotactile feedback, auditory cues, and visual information.