The sense of touch is arguably the first human sense to develop. Empowering robots with the sense of touch may augment their understanding of interacted objects and the environment beyond standard sensory modalities (e.g., vision). This paper investigates the effect of hybridizing touch and sliding movements for tactile-based texture classification. We develop three machine-learning methods within a framework to discriminate between surface textures; the first two methods use hand-engineered features, whilst the third leverages convolutional and recurrent neural network layers to learn feature representations from raw data. To compare these methods, we constructed a dataset comprising tactile data from 23 textures gathered using the iCub platform under a loosely constrained setup, i.e., with nonlinear motion. In line with findings from neuroscience, our experiments show that a good initial estimate can be obtained via touch data, which can be further refined via sliding; combining both touch and sliding data results in 98% classification accuracy over unseen test data.

Recent studies show that the growth of social robotics market will dominate the robotics sector by 2025. Social robots are set to enter and co-exist in daily living, making human-robot interaction studies a crucial research direction in these robotics applications. One such application is the deployment of robotics in information dissemination to augment the shrinking workforce in developed economies, such as advertisement campaigns. This work seeks to understand whether live robot advertiser can better engage audience and improve audience perception of a marketed product as compared to pre-filmed video advertising clips. In this preliminary study, a humanoid robot, the NAO, was programmed to act according to a marketing campaign script, engaging the audience through voice, simulated eye-contacts, gestures and interaction with the Keepon, a robot to be advertised. We carried out three sets of experiments in the CBD of Singapore on teenage pedestrians. The results of this study suggest that physical robot presence will enhance information dissemination and hence improve advertising result, providing value-add to the advertised product.