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

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

Cross-cultural perspectives on emotion expressive humanoid robotic head: recognition of facial expressions and symbols

Emotion display through facial expressions is an important channel of communication. However, between humans there are differences in the way a meaning to facial cues is assigned, depending on the background culture. This leads to a gap in recognition rates of expressions: this problem is present when displaying a robotic face too, as a robot’s facial expression recognition is often hampered by a cultural divide, and poor scores of recognition rate may lead to poor acceptance and interaction. It would be desirable if robots could switch their output facial configuration flexibly, adapting to different cultural backgrounds. To achieve this, we made a generation system that produces facial expressions and applied it to the 24 degrees of freedom head of the humanoid social robot KOBIAN-R, and thanks to the work of illustrators and cartoonists, the system can generate two versions of the same expression, in order to be easily recognisable by both Japanese and Western subjects. As a tool for making recognition easier, the display of Japanese comic symbols on the robotic face has also been introduced and evaluated. In this work, we conducted a cross-cultural study aimed at assessing this gap in recognition and finding solutions for it. The investigation was extended to Egyptian subjects too, as a sample of another different culture. Results confirmed the differences in recognition rates, the effectiveness of customising expressions, and the usefulness of symbols display, thereby suggesting that this approach might be valuable for robots that in the future will interact in a multi-cultural environment

Generation of humanoid robot's facial expressions for context-aware communication

Communication between humans and robots is a very important aspect in the field of Humanoid Robotics. For a natural interaction, robots capable of nonverbal communication must be developed. However, despite the most recent efforts, robots still can show only limited expression capabilities. The purpose of this work is to create a facial expression generator that can be applied to the 24 DoF head of the humanoid robot KOBIAN-R. In this manuscript, we present a system that based on relevant studies of human communication and facial anatomy can produce thousands of combinations of facial and neck movements. The wide range of expressions covers not only primary emotions, but also complex or blended ones, as well as communication acts that are not strictly categorized as emotions. Results showed that the recognition rate of expressions produced by this system is comparable to the rate of recognition of the most common facial expressions. Context-based recognition, which is especially important in case of more complex communication acts, was also evaluated. Results proved that produced robotic expressions can alter the meaning of a sentence in the same way as human expressions do. We conclude that our system can successfully improve the communication abilities of KOBIAN-R, making it capable of complex interaction in the future

The Italy–Japan workshop: A history of bilateral cooperation, pushing the boundaries of robotics

This article presents the experience of a longlasting collaboration in robotics between the countries of Japan and Italy. The diversity of the approaches to robotics research and technology in the two countries and, at the same time, the similarity of some social drives for robotics progress have created a stimulus for generating new thinking about robotics. Not only has this occurred at the main participant institutions of Waseda University in Tokyo and Scuola Superiore Sant?Anna in Pisa, Italy, but it has also happened worldwide. The authors present a summary of the Italy-Japan workshops, exploring topics on 1) humanoid robotics, 2) the application of robotics for exploration and rescue, 3) biorobotics, 4) the use of robots in education, 5) the ethics of robotics, 6) robotics for sports, and 7) robotics for the arts. The experience of the workshops represents an example of an open-minded approach to robotics that is grounded on social challenges, explored through multidisciplinary discussion. Such interdisciplinary research efforts deserve to be shared with the international robotics community. Indeed, this approach could be used as a base model to foster further international collaborations among countries as well