Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and ETH Zürich have recently created HuggieBot 2.0, a robot that can hug users at their request. This robot, set to be presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in March, builds on a previous robotic system created by Alexis E. Block, one of the authors, during her Master’s degree.