“Stuffed Toys Alive! : Cuddly Robots from Fantasy World” by Yamashita, Ishikawa, Mitake, Takase, Kato, et al. …

  • ©Yohei Yamashita, Tatsuya Ishikawa, Hironori Mitake, Yutaka Takase, Fumihiro Kato, Ikumi Susa, Shoichi Hasegawa, and Makoto Sato

Conference:


Entry Number: 20

Title:


    Stuffed Toys Alive! : Cuddly Robots from Fantasy World

Presenter(s):



Description:


    Stuffed toys live with all ages and hold them in some physical and mental aspects. With the soft feel and cute characters, stuffed toys play with them, sleep together and listen to their complaints. These roles of stuffed toys show that people imagine stuffed toys are interactive creature. Indeed, there are many stories and movies in which stuffed toys work as living characters. However, stuffed toys in real world are just dolls and they cannot move and react.

    Animatronics, pets and social robots with skin of stuffed toys [Shibata and Tanie 2001][Stiehl et al. 2006] realize soft motion of creatures in our imagination world. However, they don’t have soft feelings. It is known that ”transitional object” for infants begins from soft object. The soft feel will be a cause for familiarity of stuffed toys. Thus, we propose a mechanism for stuffed toy type robots (“cuddly robots”) which keep the soft feel of stuffed toys.

References:


    SHIBATA, T., AND TANIE, K. 2001. Physical and affective interaction between human and mental commit robot. In Proc. of ICRA 2001, vol. 3, 2572 – 2577 vol.3.

    STIEHL, W. D., BREAZEAL, C., HAN, K.-H., LIEBERMAN, J., LALLA, L., MAYMIN, A., SALINAS, J., FUENTES, D., TOSCANO, R., TONG, C. H., AND KISHORE, A. 2006. The huggable: a therapeutic robotic companion for relational, affective touch. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Emerging technologies.

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