Effects of changing reliability on trust of robot systems

Abstract

Prior work in human-autonomy interaction has focused on plant systems that operate in highly structured environments. In contrast, many human-robot interaction (HRI) tasks are dynamic and unstructured, occurring in the open world. It is our belief that methods developed for the measurement and modeling of trust in traditional automation need alteration in order to be useful for HRI. Therefore, it is important to characterize the factors in HRI that influence trust. This study focused on the influence of changing autonomy reliability. Participants experienced a set of challenging robot handling scenarios that forced autonomy use and kept them focused on autonomy performance. The counterbalanced experiment included scenarios with different low reliability windows so that we could examine how drops in reliability altered trust and use of autonomy. Drops in reliability were shown to affect trust, the frequency and timing of autonomy mode switching, as well as participants' self-assessments of performance. A regression analysis on a number of robot, personal, and scenario factors revealed that participants tie trust more strongly to their own actions rather than robot performance.

Towards Modeling Real-Time Trust in Asymmetric Human–Robot Collaborations

“…A one-way two-tailed Student's t-test revealed that the mean of the pre-session trust assessments across all users and all sessions (including practice sessions) was significantly different from 0.5 (p < 0.05). This positivity bias is consistent with similar findings in other human-robot studies [5,6]. Looking at the average user responses, the gain in trust in reaction to the highperformance boundary tracker settings of Baseline is logically expected, and similarly so are the losses in trust due to failures during the PoorStart and RobotFault scenarios.…”

“…This event-centric view also differentiates our investigations from the majority of studies in the literature, which have characterized impacts on trust from aggregated interaction experiences on longer-term time scales (e.g. [5,8,21]). …”

“…Our study of human-robot trust is most similar to the work by Desai et al [4,5], which carried out a multitude of investigations on trust within a search-andrescue tele-robotics setting. In particular, the authors' quantified the effects on trust of diverse interaction-level factors, including the level of autonomy, degree of robot reliability, amount of situational awareness, etc.…”

“…In addition, the necessary complexity in autonomous solutions (e.g. [5,7]) warrants the need of trust. Finally, these setups are relevant to a wide variety of different robot platforms and application contexts.…”

“…We iterated over 11 window duration values of W = [0. 5,1,2,3,4,6,8,10,12,15,20] seconds, and . Each stepwise regression model was built using the same procedure as described in Sect.…”