Cultural adaptation, i.e., the matching of a robot’s behaviours to the cultural norms and preferences of its user, is a well known key requirement for the success of any assistive application. However, culture-dependent robot behaviours are often implicitly set by designers, thus not allowing for an easy and automatic adaptation to different cultures. This paper presents a method for the design of culture-aware robots, that can automatically adapt their behaviour to conform to a given culture. We propose a mapping from cultural factors to related parameters of robot behaviours which relies on linguistic variables to encode heterogeneous cultural factors in a uniform formalism, and on fuzzy rules to encode qualitative relations among multiple variables. We illustrate the approach in two practical case studies.
Barbara Bruno, Fulvio Mastrogiovanni, Federico Pecora, Antonio Sgorbissa and Alessandro Saffiotti, A framework for Culture-aware Robots based on Fuzzy Logic, FUZZ-IEEE 2017, IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, Naples, Italy, July 9-12, 2017