Cultural Robotics: Robots as Participants and Creators of Culture

This introductory chapter reviews the emergence, classification, and contemporary examples of cultural robots: social robots that are shaped by, producers of, or participants in culture. We review the emergence of social robotics as a field, and then track early references to the terminology and key lines of inquiry of Cultural Robotics. Four categories of the integration of culture with robotics are outlined; and the content of the contributing chapters following this introductory chapter are summarised within these categories.