From Multicultural Agents to Culture-Aware Robots

In our work on developing multicultural agents we have primarily relied on the analysis of video recordings of multimodal face to face interactions between humans, where the videos have been collected in different cultures. This posed some questions concering the cultural biases of the analysis due to the cultural background of the annotators. For the development of culture-aware robots we have now adopted a strategy that takes this cultural bias into account as a feature of the development process by integrating the potential user groups from different cultures into this process. We exemplify this approach with a case study on affective body movements for a humanoid robot.