Bi-cultural Investigation of Collisions in Social Navigation

Abstract

Imagine a service robot developed in the United States (US) being deployed in a public space in Israel. Due to the cultural differences, the robot from a ``contact-averse'' culture (i.e., the US) might find it difficult to find its way when navigating the crowd, as people from a ``contact-tolerant'' culture (i.e., Israel) - where a subtle touch between strangers is not uncommon - will always move closer to the robot than it would expect; conversely, an ``Israeli'' robot may be found too aggressive in US social spaces. Currently, these cultural differences hinder the ability to plug-and-play social robots in different cultures due to the requirement of extensive extra engineering effort. This paper presents a comparison of the results from an existing study conducted in the US with the same study design that was deployed in Israel. This comparison shows the clear, identifiable criteria that a socially aware robot will need to consider when navigating a new culture. More generally, the results from this paper offer a first step to identifying the cultural differences in social robot navigation so we can structure solutions to be compatible with these cultures and with novel ones, with minimum adaptation.