The Role of Trust in Human-Robot Interaction

As robots become increasingly common in a wide variety of domains—from military and scientific applications to entertainment and home use—there is an increasing need to define and assess the trust humans have when interacting with robots. In human interaction with robots and automation, previous work has discovered that humans often have a tendency to either overuse automation, especially in cases of high workload, or underuse automation, both of which can make negative outcomes more likely. Frthermore, this is not limited to naive users, but experienced ones as well. Robotics brings a new dimension to previous work in trust in automation, as they are envisioned by many to work as teammates with their operators in increasingly complex tasks. In this chapter, our goal is to highlight previous work in trust in automation and human-robot interaction and draw conclusions and recommendations based on the existing literature. We believe that, while significant progress has been made in recent years, especially in quantifying and modeling trust, there are still several places where more investigation is needed.