Biblio

To meet the high requirement of human-machine interaction, quadruped robots with human recognition and tracking capability are studied in this paper. We first introduce a marker recognition system which uses multi-thread laser scanner and retro-reflective markers to distinguish the robot's leader and other objects. When the robot follows leader autonomously, the variant A* algorithm which having obstacle grids extended virtually (EA*) is used to plan the path. But if robots need to track and follow the leader's path as closely as possible, it will trust that the path which leader have traveled is safe enough and uses the incremental form of EA* algorithm (IEA*) to reproduce the trajectory. The simulation and experiment results illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Most traditional recommendation algorithms only consider the binary relationship between users and projects, these can basically be converted into score prediction problems. But most of these algorithms ignore the users's interests, potential work factors or the other social factors of the recommending products. In this paper, based on the existing trustworthyness model and similarity measure, we puts forward the concept of trust similarity and design a joint interest-content recommendation framework to suggest users which videos to watch in the online video site. In this framework, we first analyze the user's viewing history records, tags and establish the user's interest characteristic vector. Then, based on the updated vector, users should be clustered by sparse subspace clust algorithm, which can improve the efficiency of the algorithm. We certainly improve the calculation of similarity to help users find better neighbors. Finally we conduct experiments using real traces from Tencent Weibo and Youku to verify our method and evaluate its performance. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that our approach can substantially improve the recommendation accuracy.

Throughout the last few decades, a breakthrough took place in the field of autonomous robotics. They have been introduced to perform dangerous, dirty, difficult, and dull tasks, to serve the community. They have been also used to address health-care related tasks, such as enhancing the surgical skills of the surgeons and enabling surgeries in remote areas. This may help to perform operations in remote areas efficiently and in timely manner, with or without human intervention. One of the main advantages is that robots are not affected with human-related problems such as: fatigue or momentary lapses of attention. Thus, they can perform repeated and tedious operations. In this paper, we propose a framework to establish trust in autonomous medical robots based on mutual understanding and transparency in decision making.

In medical human-robot interactions, trust plays an important role since for patients there may be more at stake than during other kinds of encounters with robots. In the current study, we address issues of trust in the interaction with a prototype of a therapeutic robot, the Universal RoboTrainer, in which the therapist records patient-specific tasks for the patient by means of kinesthetic guidance of the patients arm, which is connected to the robot. We carried out a user study with twelve pairs of participants who collaborate on recording a training program on the robot. We examine a) the degree with which participants identify the situation as uncomfortable or distressing, b) participants' own strategies to mitigate that stress, c) the degree to which the robot is held responsible for the problems occurring and the amount of agency ascribed to it, and d) when usability issues arise, what effect these have on participants' trust. We find signs of distress mostly in contexts with usability issues, as well as many verbal and kinesthetic mitigation strategies intuitively employed by the participants. Recommendations for robots to increase users' trust in kinesthetic interactions include the timely production of verbal cues that continuously confirm that everything is alright as well as increased contingency in the presentation of strategies for recovering from usability issues arising.

In this paper, we study trust-related human factors in supervisory control of swarm robots with varied levels of autonomy (LOA) in a target foraging task. We compare three LOAs: manual, mixed-initiative (MI), and fully autonomous LOA. In the manual LOA, the human operator chooses headings for a flocking swarm, issuing new headings as needed. In the fully autonomous LOA, the swarm is redirected automatically by changing headings using a search algorithm. In the mixed-initiative LOA, if performance declines, control is switched from human to swarm or swarm to human. The result of this work extends the current knowledge on human factors in swarm supervisory control. Specifically, the finding that the relationship between trust and performance improved for passively monitoring operators (i.e., improved situation awareness in higher LOAs) is particularly novel in its contradiction of earlier work. We also discover that operators switch the degree of autonomy when their trust in the swarm system is low. Last, our analysis shows that operator's preference for a lower LOA is confirmed for a new domain of swarm control.

The presence of robots is becoming more apparent as technology progresses and the market focus transitions from smart phones to robotic personal assistants such as those provided by Amazon and Google. The integration of robots in our societies is an inevitable tendency in which robots in many forms and with many functionalities will provide services to humans. This calls for an understanding of how humans are affected by both the presence of and the reliance on robots to perform services for them. In this paper we explore the effects that robots have on humans when a service is performed on request. We expose three groups of human participants to three levels of service completion performed by robots. We record and analyse human perceptions such as propensity to trust, competency, responsiveness, sociability, and team work ability. Our results demonstrate that humans tend to trust robots and are more willing to interact with them when they autonomously recover from failure by requesting help from other robots to fulfil their service. This supports the view that autonomy and team working capabilities must be brought into robots in an effort to strengthen trust in robots performing a service.

A recent study featuring a new kind of care robot indicated that participants expect a robot's ethical decision-making to be transparent to develop trust, even though the same type of `inspection of thoughts' isn't expected of a human carer. At first glance, this might suggest that robot transparency mechanisms are required for users to develop trust in robot-made ethical decisions. But the participants were found to desire transparency only when they didn't know the specifics of a human-robot social interaction. Humans trust others without observing their thoughts, which implies other means of determining trustworthiness. The study reported here suggests that the method is social interaction and observation, signifying that trust is a social construct. Moreover, that `social determinants of trust' are the transparent elements. This socially determined behaviour draws on notions of virtue ethics. If a caregiver (nurse or robot) consistently provides good, ethical care, then patients can trust that caregiver to do so often. The same social determinants may apply to care robots and thus it ought to be possible to trust them without the ability to see their thoughts. This study suggests why transparency mechanisms may not be effective in helping to develop trust in care robot ethical decision-making. It suggests that roboticists need to build sociable elements into care robots to help patients to develop patient trust in the care robot's ethical decision-making.

With the recent advances in computing, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a key component in the future of advanced applications. In one application in particular, AI has played a major role - that of revolutionizing traditional healthcare assistance. Using embodied interactive agents, or interactive robots, in healthcare scenarios has emerged as an innovative way to interact with patients. As an essential factor for interpersonal interaction, trust plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining a patient-agent relationship. In this paper, we discuss a study related to healthcare in which we examine aspects of trust between humans and interactive robots during a therapy intervention in which the agent provides corrective feedback. A total of twenty participants were randomly assigned to receive corrective feedback from either a robotic agent or a human agent. Survey results indicate trust in a therapy intervention coupled with a robotic agent is comparable to that of trust in an intervention coupled with a human agent. Results also show a trend that the agent condition has a medium-sized effect on trust. In addition, we found that participants in the robot therapist condition are 3.5 times likely to have trust involved in their decision than the participants in the human therapist condition. These results indicate that the deployment of interactive robot agents in healthcare scenarios has the potential to maintain quality of health for future generations.

When robots and human users collaborate, trust is essential for user acceptance and engagement. In this paper, we investigated two factors thought to influence user trust towards a robot: preference elicitation (a combination of user involvement and explanation) and embodiment. We set our experiment in the application domain of a restaurant recommender system, assessing trust via user decision making and perceived source credibility. Previous research in this area uses simulated environments and recommender systems that present the user with the best choice from a pool of options. This experiment builds on past work in two ways: first, we strengthened the ecological validity of our experimental paradigm by incorporating perceived risk during decision making; and second, we used a system that recommends a nonoptimal choice to the user. While no effect of embodiment is found for trust, the inclusion of preference elicitation features significantly increases user trust towards the robot recommender system. These findings have implications for marketing and health promotion in relation to Human-Robot Interaction and call for further investigation into the development and maintenance of trust between robot and user.

With recent advances in robotics, it is expected that robots will become increasingly common in human environments, such as in the home and workplaces. Robots will assist and collaborate with humans on a variety of tasks. During these collaborations, it is inevitable that disagreements in decisions would occur between humans and robots. Among factors that lead to which decision a human should ultimately follow, theirs or the robot, trust is a critical factor to consider. This study aims to investigate individuals' behaviors and aspects of trust in a problem-solving situation in which a decision must be made in a bounded amount of time. A between-subject experiment was conducted with 100 participants. With the assistance of a humanoid robot, participants were requested to tackle a cognitive-based task within a given time frame. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the following initial conditions: 1) a working robot in which the robot provided a correct answer or 2) a faulty robot in which the robot provided an incorrect answer. Impacts of the faulty robot behavior on participant's decision to follow the robot's suggested answer were analyzed. Survey responses about trust were collected after interacting with the robot. Results indicated that the first impression has a significant impact on participant's behavior of trusting a robot's advice during a disagreement. In addition, this study discovered evidence supporting that individuals still have trust in a malfunctioning robot even after they have observed a robot's faulty behavior.

In this paper, we present results from a human-subject study designed to explore two facets of human mental models of robots - inferred capability and intention - and their relationship to overall trust and eventual decisions. In particular, we examine delegation situations characterized by uncertainty, and explore how inferred capability and intention are applied across different tasks. We develop an online survey where human participants decide whether to delegate control to a simulated UAV agent. Our study shows that human estimations of robot capability and intent correlate strongly with overall self-reported trust. However, overall trust is not independently sufficient to determine whether a human will decide to trust (delegate) a given task to a robot. Instead, our study reveals that estimations of robot intention, capability, and overall trust are integrated when deciding to delegate. From a broader perspective, these results suggest that calibrating overall trust alone is insufficient; to make correct decisions, humans need (and use) multi-faceted mental models when collaborating with robots across multiple contexts.

Trust is an important topic in medical human-robot interaction, since patients may be more fragile than other groups of people. This paper investigates the issue of users' trust when interacting with a rehabilitation robot. In the study, we investigate participants' heart rate and perception of safety in a scenario when their arm is led by the rehabilitation robot in two types of exercises at three different velocities. The participants' heart rate are measured during each exercise and the participants are asked how safe they feel after each exercise. The results showed that velocity and type of exercise has no significant influence on the participants' heart rate, but they do have significant influence on how safe they feel. We found that increasing velocity and longer exercises negatively influence participants' perception of safety.

In socially assistive robotics, an important research area is the development of adaptation techniques and their effect on human-robot interaction. We present a meta-learning based policy gradient method for addressing the problem of adaptation in human-robot interaction and also investigate its role as a mechanism for trust modelling. By building an escape room scenario in mixed reality with a robot, we test our hypothesis that bi-directional trust can be influenced by different adaptation algorithms. We found that our proposed model increased the perceived trustworthiness of the robot and influenced the dynamics of gaining human's trust. Additionally, participants evaluated that the robot perceived them as more trustworthy during the interactions with the meta-learning based adaptation compared to the previously studied statistical adaptation model.

Humans often assume that robots are rational. We believe robots take optimal actions given their objective; hence, when we are uncertain about what the robot's objective is, we interpret the robot's actions as optimal with respect to our estimate of its objective. This approach makes sense when robots straightforwardly optimize their objective, and enables humans to learn what the robot is trying to achieve. However, our insight is that-when robots are aware that humans learn by trusting that the robot actions are rational-intelligent robots do not act as the human expects; instead, they take advantage of the human's trust, and exploit this trust to more efficiently optimize their own objective. In this paper, we formally model instances of human-robot interaction (HRI) where the human does not know the robot's objective using a two-player game. We formulate different ways in which the robot can model the uncertain human, and compare solutions of this game when the robot has conservative, optimistic, rational, and trusting human models. In an offline linear-quadratic case study and a real-time user study, we show that trusting human models can naturally lead to communicative robot behavior, which influences end-users and increases their involvement.

The growing diffusion of robotics in our daily life demands a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of trust in human-robot interaction. The performance of a robot is one of the most important factors influencing the trust of a human user. However, it is still unclear whether the circumstances in which a robot fails to affect the user's trust. We investigate how the perception of robot failures may influence the willingness of people to cooperate with the robot by following its instructions in a time-critical task. We conducted an experiment in which participants interacted with a robot that had previously failed in a related or an unrelated task. We hypothesized that users' observed and self-reported trust ratings would be higher in the condition where the robot has previously failed in an unrelated task. A proof-of-concept study with nine participants timidly confirms our hypothesis. At the same time, our results reveal some flaws in the design experimental, and encourage a future large scale study.

When a robot breaks a person's trust by making a mistake or failing, continued interaction will depend heavily on how the robot repairs the trust that was broken. Prior work in psychology has demonstrated that both the trust violation framing and the trust repair strategy influence how effectively trust can be restored. We investigate trust repair between a human and a robot in the context of a competitive game, where a robot tries to restore a human's trust after a broken promise, using either a competence or integrity trust violation framing and either an apology or denial trust repair strategy. Results from a 2×2 between-subjects study ( n=82) show that participants interacting with a robot employing the integrity trust violation framing and the denial trust repair strategy are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral retaliation toward the robot. In the Dyadic Trust Scale survey, an interaction between trust violation framing and trust repair strategy was observed. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering both trust violation framing and trust repair strategy choice when designing robots to repair trust. We also discuss the influence of human-to-robot promises and ethical considerations when framing and repairing trust between a human and robot.

Robots that interact with children are becoming more common in places such as child care and hospital environments. While such robots may mistakenly provide nonsensical information, or have mechanical malfunctions, we know little of how these robot errors are perceived by children, and how they impact trust. This is particularly important when robots provide children with information or instructions, such as in education or health care. Drawing inspiration from established psychology literature investigating how children trust entities who teach or provide them with information (informants), we designed and conducted an experiment to examine how robot errors affect how young children (3-5 years old) trust robots. Our results suggest that children utilize their understanding of people to develop their perceptions of robots, and use this to determine how to interact with robots. Specifically, we found that children developed their trust model of a robot based on the robot's previous errors, similar to how they would for a person. We however failed to replicate other prior findings with robots. Our results provide insight into how children as young as 3 years old might perceive robot errors and develop trust.

Project Aquaticus is a human-robot teaming competition on the water involving autonomous surface vehicles and human operated motorized kayaks. Teams composed of both humans and robots share the same physical environment to play capture the flag. In this paper, we present results from seven competitions of our half-court (one participant versus one robot) game. We found that participants indicated more trust in more aggressive behaviors from robots.

Human-robot trust is crucial to successful human-robot interaction. We conducted a study with 798 participants distributed across 32 conditions using four dimensions of human-robot trust (reliable, capable, ethical, sincere) identified by the Multi-Dimensional-Measure of Trust (MDMT). We tested whether these dimensions can differentially capture gains and losses in human-robot trust across robot roles and contexts. Using a 4 scenario × 4 trust dimension × 2 change direction between-subjects design, we found the behavior change manipulation effective for each of the four subscales. However, the pattern of results best supported a two-dimensional conception of trust, with reliable-capable and ethical-sincere as the major constituents.

The purpose of this study was to propose a model of development of trust in social robots. Insights in interpersonal trust were adopted from social psychology and a novel model was proposed. In addition, this study aimed to investigate the relationship among trust development and self-esteem. To validate the proposed model, an experiment using a communication robot NAO was conducted and changes in categories of trust as well as self-esteem were measured. Results showed that general and category trust have been developed in the early phase. Self-esteem is also increased along the interactions with the robot.