Culturally Sensitive Human-Robot Interaction: A Case Study with the Pepper Humanoid Robot

Socio-cultural factors play a significant role in achieving the trust and acceptance required to realize the potential of artifiical intelligence and robotics. Consequently, culturally sensitive human-robot interaction is essential for the adoption of social robots in Africa. Three elements must be present to achieve this: cultural knowledge representation, culturally sensitive planning and action execution, and culturally aware multimodal human-robot interaction. This paper presents a system architecture for culturally sensitive human-robot interaction in Africa that addresses these three elements, an initial set of software interaction primitives, and a practical demonstration of culturally sensitive human-robot interaction using the Pepper humanoid robot.