Shaping Interactions through Haptic Interfaces

Dear Colleagues,

Touch is one of the key senses we develop as human beings. The moment we are born, direct contact with our carers is vital to initiate bonding and communication. Touch helps us interact with our environment from early stages shaping our understanding of the world through exploration, and later on, to interact socially and physically with each other and our surroundings.

It is not surprising thus, that touch has been gaining relevance in research on multimodal interactions with intelligent systems. However, despite the utmost importance of touch in physical interactions, the use of haptics is underrepresented when developing intelligent systems. In the context of human-robot interaction, haptic-shared control systems are gaining popularity, where haptic feedback plays a significant role not only to guide the human in an intuitive and transparent way towards the task goals, but also to convey valuable information regarding the task and the operation of the autonomous controller. However, there is yet a huge need for developing customised tangible interfaces for scene interactions, as well as formal mechanisms that implement human-like communication cues at the system-end.

In this special issue, we focus on key aspects of touch interaction including haptic human-object, human-human and human-robot interaction. On the one hand, we are interested in understanding how humans interact through touch with other entities (whether animated or inanimate), what information we can extract from the way people touch these and what the purpose of such different ways of sensing the world is. This includes the design of novel haptic interfaces to interact effectively with real and virtual objects and environments, and the development of approaches to process the information carried over touch interactions to better understand human interaction. On the other hand, we are interested in different haptic-based models that can provide such ability to intelligent systems to reply back to human interactions with readable haptic-based behaviours, potentially creating natural and specific haptic languages.

This special issue aims at collecting research on interactive systems that make use of haptics either to:

• gather haptic information to enrich perception and understanding on intention
• provide the user with haptic information to enrich communication between human and system
• or both, thus achieving bidirectional haptic communication

We invite contributions from different fields related to haptics, such as robotics, control, psychology, HCI, neuroscience or any related field, addressing aspects of haptic human-object, human-human and human-robot interaction.

Dr. Raquel Ros Espinoza
Dr. David Miralles
Dr. Ayse Kucukyilmaz
Guest Editors

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