Diversity-aware social robots meet people: beyond context-aware embodied AI
This addresses the need for more inclusive human-robot interactions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing culturally competent robotics approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of social robots lacking diversity-awareness by proposing computational models to enable robots to adapt their behavior to respect individual uniqueness and promote inclusion, suggesting technical solutions like Ontologies and Bayesian Networks based on prior work with culturally competent robots.
The article introduces the concept of "diversity-aware" robotics and discusses the need to develop computational models to embed robots with diversity-awareness: that is, robots capable of adapting and re-configuring their behavior to recognize, respect, and value the uniqueness of the person they interact with to promote inclusion regardless of their age, race, gender, cognitive or physical capabilities, etc. Finally, the article discusses possible technical solutions based on Ontologies and Bayesian Networks, starting from previous experience with culturally competent robots.