Trust or Not?: A Computational Robot-Trusting-Human Model for Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

The trust of a robot in its human partner is a significant issue in human-robot interaction, which is seldom explored in the field of robotics. This study addresses a critical issue of robots' trust in humans during the human-robot collaboration process based on the data of human motions, past interactions of the human-robot pair, and the human's current performance in the co-carry task. The trust level is evaluated dynamically throughout the collaborative task that allows the trust level to change if the human performs false positive actions, which can help the robot avoid making unpredictable movements and causing injury to the human. Experimental results showed that the robot effectively assisted the human in collaborative tasks through the proposed computational trust model.