Design of Embodied Mediator Haru for Remote Cross Cultural Communication

Social robots for children have focused mainly on conventional education domains such as teaching language, science, and math, while applications focusing on the enhancement of cultural competency are quite scarce. In this paper, we present a prototype of a robot-mediation framework for cross-cultur...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 5505 - 5511
Main Authors Gomez, Randy, Szapiro, Deborah, Cooper, Sara, Bougria, Nabil, Perez, Guillermo, Nichols, Eric, Gimenez-Figueroa, Javier, Perez-Moleron, Jose M., Peavy, Matthew, Serrano, Daniel, Merino, Luis
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 13.05.2024
Subjects
Cross-cultural communication
Drives
Education
Focusing
Prototypes
Social robots
Technical requirements
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Summary:Social robots for children have focused mainly on conventional education domains such as teaching language, science, and math, while applications focusing on the enhancement of cultural competency are quite scarce. In this paper, we present a prototype of a robot-mediation framework for cross-cultural communication. This framework paves the way for a social robot to act as a mediator between groups of schoolchildren from different countries. First, we conducted a participatory design activity by an interdisciplinary team, resulting in the extraction of the design, robot's roles, and technical requirements. Based on these requirements, we built the robot-mediation system prototype. We conducted a pilot study using the system with groups of high school children in Japan and Australia and our results show the potential of the system to drive children's interest in communicating, sharing, and discussing cultural themes with their remote peers through the social robot.
DOI:10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10611253