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A novel greeting selection system for a culture-adaptive humanoid robot

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posted on 2015-05-20, 15:52 authored by Gabriele Trovato, Massimiliano ZeccaMassimiliano Zecca, Martin Do, Omer Terlemez, Masuko Kuramochi, Alexander Waibel, Tamim Asfour, Atsuo Takanishi
Robots, especially humanoids, are expected to perform human-like actions and adapt to our ways of communication in order to facilitate their acceptance in human society. Among humans, rules of communication change depending on background culture: greetings are a part of communication in which cultural differences are strong. Robots should adapt to these specific differences in order to communicate effectively, being able to select the appropriate manner of greeting for different cultures depending on the social context. In this paper, we present the modelling of social factors that influence greeting choice, and the resulting novel culture-dependent greeting gesture and words selection system. An experiment with German participants was run using the humanoid robot ARMARIIIb. Thanks to this system, the robot, after interacting with Germans, can perform greeting gestures appropriate to German culture in addition to a repertoire of greetings appropriate to Japanese culture.

Funding

This work was supported by the “Strategic Young Researcher Overseas Visits Program for Accelerating Brain Circulation” program from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. The study was conducted as part of the Research Institute for Science and Engineering, Waseda University, and as part of the humanoid project at the Waseda University. The experiment was carried out in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, thanks to InterACT, the Waseda/KIT exchange network.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

Volume

12

Issue

34

Citation

TROVATO, G. ... et al, 2015. A novel greeting selection system for a culture-adaptive humanoid robot. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 12 (34), DOI: 10.5772/60117.

Publisher

INTECH / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is an open access article published by INTECH and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

1729-8806

Language

  • en