Towards culturally aware robot navigation

When we look towards the world of humans and robots harmonically working together in a social environment, the robots should behave in cultural norms. A culturally aware robot navigation is highly expected to enable mobile service robots to politely and respectfully navigate among humans in human-robot shared workspaces. In this paper, we present a foundation of culturally aware robot navigation for mobile service robots in a social environment. The culturally aware robot navigation system is developed by integrating extended personal spaces representing individual states and social interaction spaces representing human-robot interactions and human groups. The culturally aware robot navigation plays the role of human-aware decision making upon the conventional robot navigation system to ensure that a mobile service robot is capable of detecting and identifying social contexts and situations to culturally navigate in human appearances. Simulation results illustrate our methodological approach.