Socially Inclusive Robots: Learning Culture-Related Gestures by Playing with Pepper

Social robots are being used successfully as educational technologies. In this paper we propose to use a social robot, Pepper in this case, to teach and explain the meaning of culture-related gestures to unaccompanied minor migrants and support their integration in a new culture. The use of social humanoid robots seems to be an adequate interaction mean to this aim, since they can provide both examples of gesture executions, explanations about the meaning and the context in which the gesture should be used. Moreover, as in other assistive domains, social robots may be used to attract the children's attention and support the social operator in establishing contact with these children that very often, after the difficulties of the journey, do not trust adults. Results of a preliminary study, even if performed with a limited number of participants, show that the proposed approach is suitable for learning gestures.