ABSTRACT
T his chapter identifies the emergence of a desire amongst contempo-rary social roboticists for increased collaboration, deeper interaction and more meaningful and subtle relationships in human-robot interaction. Therefore we contribute a cognitive model that has been developed to identify the determinants of human willingness to collaborate with a robot counterpart, and specifically what factors influence our assessment of our own capacity and that of a robot prior to and during collaboration. We argue that the assessment of a robot will be fast, automatic and based primarily upon an ocularcentric judgement of aesthetics, and the culture of both the human participant and that which has shaped and is ultimately projected by, the robot. With this in mind we introduce the emergence of “Cultural Robotics” as consideration for the future development of collaborative robotic agents.
7.1 INTRODUCTION In the last decade, the field of social robotics has seen rapid growth and the development of many variants of ’sociable machines’ [16]. With functions ranging from museum tour guides [60] to bartenders [31], social robots have been developed to participate in an extraordinary range of roles, including domestic helpers [58], musical collaborators [63], and friends [62]. These ’relational artefacts’ no longer simply do things for us, they do things with us [62].
