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Robots might not act according to human expectations if they cannot anticipate how people make sense of a situation and what behavior they consider appropriate in some given circumstances. In many cases, understanding, expectations and behavior are constrained, if not driven, by culture, and a robot that knows about human culture could improve the quality level of human–robot interaction. Can we share human culture with a robot? Can we provide robots with formal representations of different cultures? In this paper, we discuss the (elusive) notion of culture and propose an approach based on the notion of trait which, we argue, permits us to build formal modules suitable to represent culture (broadly understood) in a robot architecture. We distinguish the types of traits that such modules should contain, namely behavior, knowledge, rule and interpretation traits, and how they could be organized. We identify the interpretation process that maps situations to specific knowledge traits, called scenarios, as a key component of the trait-based culture module. Finally, we describe how culture modules can be integrated in an existing architecture, and discuss three use cases to exemplify the advantages of having a culture module in the robot architecture highlighting surprising potentialities.

Rural landscape is the resource base to develop rural tourism. Under the background of tourism development, the “rurality” of rural landscape is threatened by the reverse change of rural landscape patterns, which goes against the sustainable development of rural tourism. From the perspective of landscape ecology, the paper makes a deep analysis of negative influence of the development of rural tourism nowadays on rural landscape ecology and explores how to actively and effectively protect rural landscape so as to promote the sustainable and healthy development of rural landscape tourism. Moreover, methods and measures aiming to facilitate the rational development of rural landscape are put forward.