Autonomous Critical Help by a Robotic Assistant in the Field of Cultural Heritage: A New Challenge for Evolving Human-Robot Interaction

Over the years, the purpose of cultural heritage (CH) sites (e.g., museums) has focused on providing personalized services to different users, with the main goal of adapting those services to the visitors’ personal traits, goals, and interests. In this work, we propose a computational cognitive model that provides an artificial agent (e.g., robot, virtual assistant) with the capability to personalize a museum visit to the goals and interests of the user that intends to visit the museum by taking into account the goals and interests of the museum curators that have designed the exhibition. In particular, we introduce and analyze a special type of help (critical help) that leads to a substantial change in the user’s request, with the objective of taking into account the needs that the same user cannot or has not been able to assess. The computational model has been implemented by exploiting the multi-agent oriented programming (MAOP) framework JaCaMo, which integrates three different multi-agent programming levels. We provide the results of a pilot study that we conducted in order to test the potential of the computational model. The experiment was conducted with 26 real participants that have interacted with the humanoid robot Nao, widely used in Human-Robot interaction (HRI) scenarios.