A framework for Culture-aware Robots based on Fuzzy Logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fuzzy logic-based framework enabling robots to automatically adapt their behaviors to different cultural norms, improving their effectiveness in assistive applications across diverse cultural contexts.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for designing culture-aware robots using linguistic variables and fuzzy rules to map cultural factors to robot behaviors.

Findings

Successful implementation in two case studies

Effective adaptation to different cultural norms

Flexible and automatic behavior adjustment

Abstract

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.