{"ID":6537422,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-14T02:54:43.516908796Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-15T03:28:55.185153975Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11690","arxiv_id":"2607.11690","title":"Requirement-Driven Design of Whole-Body Social Tactile Sensing via Virtual Human-Robot Interaction","abstract":"Tactile sensing for social-physical human-robot interaction (spHRI) is designed in a hardware-driven manner, where predefined sensor configurations constrain coverage, spatial resolution, and the range of recognizable gestures. We propose a requirement-driven framework that derives sensing requirements, specifically spatial resolution and placement, directly from interaction data. Using a VR-based platform with haptic feedback, we collected high-resolution whole-body contact distributions across multiple social scenarios, from which we identified nine recurring social touch gestures. Eight gestures were selected for controlled data collection with 18 participants, yielding an open-source dataset of 5,520 trials. Analysis of contact distributions and simulated tactile encodings provides quantitative baselines for skin coverage and sensor density on a humanoid robot platform. While demonstrated on a single robot platform, the methodology is designed to be transferable to other robot morphologies, potentially enabling morphology-specific sensing requirements to be derived prior to hardware fabrication.","short_abstract":"Tactile sensing for social-physical human-robot interaction (spHRI) is designed in a hardware-driven manner, where predefined sensor configurations constrain coverage, spatial resolution, and the range of recognizable gestures. We propose a requirement-driven framework that derives sensing requirements, specifically sp...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11690","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.11690v1","authors":"[\"Dakarai Crowder\",\"Ruohan Zhang\",\"Alexis E. Block\",\"Wenzhen Yuan\"]","published":"2026-07-13T15:23:45Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\",\"cs.HC\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}