To Örebro University

The way in which humans behave, speak andinteract is deeply influenced by their culture. For example,greeting is done differently in France, in Sweden or in Japan;and the average interpersonal distance changes from onecultural group to the other. In order to successfully coexistwith humans, robots should also adapt their behavior to theculture, customs and manners of the persons they interact with.In this paper, we deal with an important ingredient of culturaladaptation: how to generate robot plans that respect givencultural preferences, and how to execute them in a way thatis sensitive to those preferences. We present initial results inthis direction in the context of the CARESSES project, a jointEU-Japan effort to build culturally competent assistive robots.