Autonomous Critical Help provided by an Artificial Agent in the field of Cultural Heritage

In this work we introduce a computational cognitive model that provide an intelligent agent (eg robot, virtual assistant) with the capability to personalize a museum visit. The personalization is based on the goals, interests of the user that intends to visit the museum and considers also the goals, interests of the museum curators that have designed the exhibition. We introduce and evaluate a special type of help provided by the agent, called Critical Help, that can lead to a change of the user’s request, with the goal to consider needs that the same user cannot or has not been able to assess. The computational model has been implemented by exploiting the well known agent oriented programming framework Jason. We recruited 26 real participants in a preliminary robotic experiment that we conducted in order to test the computational model. Each participant has interacted with the humanoid robot Nao, widely used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios.