Experimental designs for cross-cultural interactions: A case study on affective body movements for HRI

Culture is not the first aspect that comes to mind when discussing human robot interaction. But our cultural upbringing does to a large degree influence our patterns of behavior and interpretation. Thus, culture is present in the development of robotic systems right from the start, unconsciously influencing how robots look, what we envision with them to do, and how they are programmed to interact with the user. In this paper we argue that is is beneficial to make this unconscious influence explicit and take it into account during the development (and evaluation) of humanoid robots. To this end we present a principled approach of capturing various cultural influences during the development process of humanoid robots and exemplify this approach with a case study of affective body movements.