AHS 2025 Cuddle-Fish: Flying Robots That Are Safe, Huggable Companions

Traditional quadrotor drones pose safety concerns with their spinning blades. Cuddle-Fish takes a different approach: a helium-filled soft robot with bio-inspired flapping wings that's safe enough to touch, hug, and interact with physically. In testing with 24 participants, people spontaneously engaged in affective behaviors like patting, stroking, and even hugging the robot. Users reported positive emotional responses and felt safe during interactions, with some participants touching the robot to their cheeks, demonstrating trust and comfort.

Mingyang Xu, Jiayi Shao, Yulan Ju, Ximing Shen, Qingyuan Gao, Weijen Chen, Qing Zhang, Yun Suen Pai, Giulia Barbareschi, Matthias Hoppe, Kouta Minamizawa, and Kai Kunze. 2025. Cuddle-Fish: Exploring a Soft Floating Robot with Flapping Wings for Physical Interactions. In Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2025 (AHs '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745900.3746080