Paving the Way for Culturally Competent Robots: a Position Paper
This addresses the problem of robots lacking cultural awareness in assistive roles, but it is incremental as it builds on existing guidelines and robotics research.
The paper argues that personal assistive robots need cultural competence to be effective, similar to healthcare, and identifies key capabilities and methodologies for developing and evaluating such robots.
Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.