Trait-based Module for Culturally-Competent Robots

Robots might not act according to human expectations if they cannot anticipate how people make sense of a situation and what behavior they consider appropriate in some given circumstances. In many cases, understanding, expectations and behavior are constrained, if not driven, by culture, and a robot that knows about human culture could improve the quality level of human-robot interaction. Can we share human culture with a robot? Can we provide robots with formal representations of different cultures? In this paper, we discuss the (elusive) notion of culture and propose an approach based on the notion of trait which, we argue, permits us to build formal modules suitable to represent culture (broadly understood) in a robot architecture. We distinguish the types of traits that such modules should contain, namely behavior, knowledge, rule and interpretation traits, and how they could be organized. We identify the interpretation process that maps situations to specific knowledge traits, called scenarios, as a key component of the trait-based culture module. Finally, we describe how culture modules can be integrated in an existing architecture, and discuss three use cases to exemplify the advantages of having a culture module in the robot architecture highlighting surprising potentialities.

Publication type: 
Articolo
Author or Creator: 
Borgo Stefano
Blanzieri Enrico
Publisher: 
World Scientific,, New Jersey , Singapore
Source: 
International journal of humanoid robotics (2019). doi:10.1142/S0219843619500282
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Borgo Stefano; Blanzieri Enrico/titolo:Trait-based Module for Culturally-Competent Robots/doi:10.1142/S0219843619500282/rivista:International journal of humanoid robotics/anno:2019/pagina_da:/pagina_a:/intervallo_pagine:/volume:
Date: 
2019
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/414372
https://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S0219843619500282
info:doi:10.1142/S0219843619500282
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219843619500282
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Stefano Borgo's picture
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