Cultural robotics starts from an essential premise: there is no social robotics without culture. Every interaction between a person and a robot is shaped by language, gesture, heritage, and values. Treating robots as universal, context-free technologies ignores the way communities interpret, resist, and reimagine them.
This field insists that robots are cultural actors—they embody meaning, tell stories, and mediate relationships—and that designing for sustainability means attending to material, emotional, and cultural longevity alike.
The field has met as a workshop at IEEE RO-MAN in Kobe in 2015 and at ACM/IEEE HRI in Melbourne in 2025, and as a special session at ICSR 2026. Its work is collected in three Springer volumes. The 2025 workshop drew over 40 researchers from 14 countries, spanning engineering, design, art, education, and industry.
Steering group
The organisers, across four institutions.
Contact
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