A proposed robot provides functionality inspired by the behavior of hearing dogs, which assist hearing-impaired people by alerting them to important sounds such as fire and smoke alarms. Hearing dogs use body contact for communication with hearing-impaired people, a process heavily depending on haptic communication. The proposed robot also uses physical contact for urgent notification, like a hearing dog's touching behavior. The robot can move using its wheels and then approach and bump people. To be explicit our proposal, our bumping behavior model was simplified and an experiment was conducted with hearing-impaired participants and a prototype robot. This paper reports the experimental results and discusses effectiveness of the robot's bumping behavior.

Research on physical human-robot interaction has been attracting attention recently, focusing on robot embodiment. The work reported here proposes Active Touch Communication Robot (AcToR), a robot that is modeled on the hearing dog. A hearing dog is a type of dog assist people who are deaf or hard of hearing by alerting their handler to important sounds. AcToR uses the sense of touch to notify a human of the intention to transfer information. For example, when AcToR detects that a cell phone that is in another location has received a call, AcToR moves to the user's location and makes contact with the user's body to notify the user of the incoming call. The AcToR robot is based on the Roomba®and uses the Roomba's bumper and contact sensors to detect contact. This paper reports the results of psychological experiments using the AcToR robot that indicate the feasibility of using touch to transfer information from a robot to a person.