A framework for Culture-aware Robots based on Fuzzy Logic
This addresses the need for culture-aware robots in assistive applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing fuzzy logic techniques for cultural adaptation.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling robots to automatically adapt their behavior to cultural norms, proposing a method that uses fuzzy logic to map cultural factors to robot parameters, as demonstrated in two case studies.
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.