Towards humanlike social touch for prosthetics and sociable robotics: Handshake experiments and finger phalange indentations

Abstract

The handshake has become the most acceptable gesture of greeting in many cultures. Replicating the softness of the human hand can contribute to the improvement of the emotional healing process of people who have lost their hands by enabling the concealment of prosthetic hand usage during handshake interactions. Likewise, sociable robots of the future will exchange greetings with humans. The soft humanlike hands during handshakes would be able to address the safety and acceptance issues of robotic hands. This paper investigates the areas of contact during handshake interactions. After the areas of high contact were known, indentation experiments were conducted to obtain the benchmark data for duplication with synthetic skins. © 2009 Springer.