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  1. Social touch provides a rich non-verbal communication channel between humans and robots. Prior work has identified a set of touch gestures for human-robot interaction and described them with natural language labels (e.g., stroking, patting). Yet, no data exists on the semantic relationships between the touch gestures in users’ minds. To endow robots with touch intelligence, we investigated how people perceive the similarities of social touch labels from the literature. In an online study, 45 participants grouped 36 social touch labels based on their perceived similarities and annotated their groupings with descriptive names. We derived quantitative similarities of the gestures from these groupings and analyzed the similarities using hierarchical clustering. The analysis resulted in 9 clusters of touch gestures formed around the social, emotional, and contact characteristics of the gestures. We discuss the implications of our results for designing and evaluating touch sensing and interactions with social robots. 
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  2. Recent robot collections provide various interactive tools for users to explore and analyze their datasets. Yet, the literature lacks data on how users interact with these collections and which tools can best support their goals. This late-breaking report presents preliminary data on the utility of four interactive tools for accessing a collection of robot hands. The tools include a gallery and similarity comparison for browsing and filtering existing hands, a prediction tool for estimating user impression of hands (e.g., humanlikeness), and a recommendation tool suggesting design features (e.g., number of fingers) for achieving a target user impression rating. Data from a user study with 9 novice robotics researchers suggest the users found the tools useful for various tasks and especially appreciated the gallery and recommendation functionalities for understanding the complex relationships of the data. We discuss the results and outline future steps for developing interface design guidelines for robot collections. 
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