What Is ‘Culture’ in Cultural Robotics? A Framework for Understanding Culture in Human–Robot Interaction

The dominant understanding of ‘culture’ in cultural and social robotics equates it with nationality. This is problematic for well-known reasons, but the task of improving the situation is complicated by the fact that culture has been understood in so many different ways, and that different definitions of the term are suitable for different areas of robotics. We take this issue as our starting point, and develop a framework to address it. The framework is a step-by-step structure, which takes into account relevant properties of the task that the robot is intended to fulfil, and then constructs a specific definition of culture for this particular context. The framework then translates the resulting definition into terms that make it easier to implement in actual robot design. Our framework has three aims. First, to improve on some of the problematic ways that culture is currently understood in robotics. Second, to remain flexible enough to allow for the selection of individual definitions of culture for different contexts in robotics. Third, to provide practical guidance for stakeholders in social robotics and human–robot interaction.