Encoding cultures in robot emotion representation

Cultural differences may influence interactions between humans with different social norms and cultural traits, incurring different emotional and behavioral responses. The same applies to human-robot interaction (HRI). We believe that controlling robot emotions based on the cultural context can help robots adapt to humans from culturally diverse backgrounds. Such culturally aligned robots are expected to be easily accepted by humans as part of daily life. In this paper, we aim at investigating the role of culture in representing robot emotions which are injected by humans during its early stage of development and subject to change through their own experience thereafter. Several public data sets of pictures labeled with affective ratings by Indian, American, and European subjects are presented to social humanoid Pepper robots. The result shows that robots can learn to behave socially in alignment with an individual's cultural background. Moreover, we have demonstrated that robots under the effect of different cultures can generate different behavioral responses to the same stimuli, which is considered one of the most important issues in socially assitive robotics.