“Which country are you from?” a cross-cultural study on greeting interaction design for social robots

Abstract

Greeting gestures are one of the most important aspects of social robot behavior design. Existing research has shown different greeting gesture design methods for social robots when they interact with humans. However, cultural difference, which is an important factor between human greetings, is less explored for robot greeting gesture design. In this paper, we present our effort on understanding how different robot greeting behaviors will affect human perception in a cross-cultural context. We designed four different greeting gestures for NAO robot based on human greeting customs from different Asian countries. We also conducted a user experiment, in which participants from the different countries interact with the robot after it performs a designated robot greeting gesture. In the experiment, we investigated: (1) Whether a user could perceive a robot coming from a specific country or region when the robot has a specific greeting gesture; and (2) If the user demonstrates higher valence when the robot has the same greeting gesture with his/her country. We recruited 20 participants from four different countries in the experiment. The result of the experiment suggests a cross-cultural design method for humanoid social robots interacting with users from different cultural backgrounds.