Paving the way for culturally competent robots: A position paper

Abstract

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. 1 B. Bruno and A. Sgorbissa are with the

Semantics-based platform for context-aware and personalized robot interaction in the internet of robotic things

“…NH1 -Activity Announcement Every morning, when Bob is sitting in his chair waiting for breakfast, the robot enters his room to announce a selection of today's activities in the nursing home and to read aloud a selection of news highlights. Usually, Bob enjoys the robot to have a more jovial style of greeting him [12], but the robot tones down his enthusiastic style since it detected via the bed sensors that Bob had a restless night. In the room next door, Elisabeth prefers the robot to greet her in a formal way as Mrs. Smith.…”

“…The first models administrative, biological, psychological, and sociological information. Our current ontology restricts the sociological profile to nationality and spoken language but can be extended in the future to capture other notions of a user's culture and hence become "culturally competent" [12]. Capturing cultural knowledge is the subject of ongoing work, e.g.…”

“…The scheduler requests a tentative plan (steps 2-8 in Figure 8). When the scheduled execution time approaches the scheduler will ask the planner for a plan that is up-to-date with the current context (steps [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. It will then push this plan to the dispatcher which will execute it by calling the appropriate (robotic) Action Executor (steps 18 and 19).…”

“…GUI Figure A. 12 shows the GUI that was created to allow developers to easily input the required information to create a new TGS, i.e., its name in the GENERAL tab, the filter rules in the INPUT tab, the SPARQL queries in the QUERIES tab and the used ontologies in the ONTOLOGY tab. ; now in the same room as people in the room you just entered (forall (?person -person) (when (person-at-location ?person ?to-waypoint) (robot-in-same-room-as ?robot ?person) ) )…”

Culturally-Competent Human-Robot Verbal Interaction

“…Borrowing the term from the Nursing Literature, "culturally competent robots" have been introduced in [2], by splitting the general problem in different subproblems requiring a multidisciplinary approach:…”