  Cultural adaptation, i.e., the matching of a robot's behaviours to the
cultural norms and preferences of its user, is a well known key requirement for
the success of any assistive application. However, culture-dependent robot
behaviours are often implicitly set by designers, thus not allowing for an easy
and automatic adaptation to different cultures. This paper presents a method
for the design of culture-aware robots, that can automatically adapt their
behaviour to conform to a given culture. We propose a mapping from cultural
factors to related parameters of robot behaviours which relies on linguistic
variables to encode heterogeneous cultural factors in a uniform formalism, and
on fuzzy rules to encode qualitative relations among multiple variables. We
illustrate the approach in two practical case studies.
