Episode 61: Culturally sensitive robots - Masoumeh (Iran) Mansouri

Robot Talk · 10 Nov 2023 · 30m · Episode 61

What this episode covers

Masoumeh (Iran) Mansouri, an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, discusses the challenges of creating culturally sensitive social robots and hybrid planning methods for unstructured environments. She critiques the dominant use of Hofstede’s model, which reduces culture to nationality, arguing instead for a framework that considers specific task contexts like factory collaboration or museum tours. Mansouri also explains hybrid planning, which combines task, motion, and temporal reasoning to handle dynamic obstacles and uncertainties in shared human-robot spaces.

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