Multi-task trust transfer for human–robot interaction

Trust is essential in shaping human interactions with one another and with robots. In this article we investigate how human trust in robot capabilities transfers across multiple tasks. We present a human-subject study of two distinct task domains: a Fetch robot performing household tasks and a virtual reality simulation of an autonomous vehicle performing driving and parking maneuvers. The findings expand our understanding of trust and provide new predictive models of trust evolution and transfer via latent task representations: a rational Bayes model, a data-driven neural network model, and a hybrid model that combines the two. Experiments show that the proposed models outperform prevailing models when predicting trust over unseen tasks and users. These results suggest that (i) task-dependent functional trust models capture human trust in robot capabilities more accurately and (ii) trust transfer across tasks can be inferred to a good degree. The latter enables trust-mediated robot decision-making for fluent human–robot interaction in multi-task settings.