Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

University of British Columbia

Laura Cang

PhD Student

Laura's interest in social robotics and touch interaction brought her to the SPIN lab to improve on the touch sensing capabilities of the CuddleBot - a cat sized robot designed for therapeutic use.  Her work developing machine recognition and interpretation of social touch behaviour has been published in HRI and ICMI. 

Projects

CuddleBot: A Robot that Responds to Touch Interaction
Sensing and Machine Recognition of Affective Touch
CuddleBits: Furry Handheld Affective Robot Pals

Publications

Cang, X. L., Bucci, P., Strang, Allen, J., MacLean, K. E., and Liu, H. Y. S., "Different Strokes and Different Folks: Economical Dynamic Surface Sensing and Affect-Related Touch Recognition." In Proc of ICMI '15, Seattle, WA, USA, Nov 2015, pp. 147-154.
Cang, L., Bucci, P., and MacLean, K.E., “CuddleBits: Friendly, Low-cost Furballs that Respond to Your Touch,” in Proc. of ACM Int'l Conf on Multimomdal Interaction (ICMI) - Demo, Seattle, WA, pp. 2, 2015.
Allen, J., Cang, L., Phan-Ba, M., Strang, A., and MacLean, K.E., “Introducing the CuddleBot: A Robot That Responds to Touch Gestures,” in Proc. of ACM/IEEE Int'l Conf on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) - Demo, Portland, 2015.
Jung, M.M., Cang, X.L, Poel, M., MacLean, K.E., "Touch Challenge'15: Recognizing Social Touch Gestures." In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2015 Nov 9 (pp. 387-390). ACM.
Bucci P., Cang, L., Chun, M., Marino, D., Schneider, O., Seifi, H., and MacLean KE. "CuddleBits: an iterative prototyping platform for complex haptic display." Int'l Conf on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Application - Demo London UK 2016
Cang, X.L., "Towards an Emotionally Communicative Robot: Feature Analysis for Multimodal Support of Affective Touch Recognition.", M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2016.
Bucci, P., Cang, X. L., Valair, A., Marino, D., Tseng, L., Jung, M., Rantala, J., Schneider, O. S., MacLean, K. E. "Sketching CuddleBit: Coupled Prototyping of Body and Behaviour for an Affective Robot Pet." In CHI 2017. pp. 3681-3692.