Reza Ahmadzadeh

Hossein Haeri, Reza Ahmadzadeh, Kshitij Jerath

In this work, we integrate `social' interactions into the MARL setup through a user-defined relational network and examine the effects of agent-agent relations on the rise of emergent behaviors. Leveraging insights from sociology and neuroscience, our proposed framework models agent relationships using the notion of Reward-Sharing Relational Networks (RSRN), where network edge weights act as a measure of how much one agent is invested in the success of (or `cares about') another. We construct relational rewards as a function of the RSRN interaction weights to collectively train the multi-agent system via a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm. The performance of the system is tested for a 3-agent scenario with different relational network structures (e.g., self-interested, communitarian, and authoritarian networks). Our results indicate that reward-sharing relational networks can significantly influence learned behaviors. We posit that RSRN can act as a framework where different relational networks produce distinct emergent behaviors, often analogous to the intuited sociological understanding of such networks.

Zahra Rezaei Khavas, Reza Ahmadzadeh, Paul Robinette

As the autonomy and capabilities of robotic systems increase, they are expected to play the role of teammates rather than tools and interact with human collaborators in a more realistic manner, creating a more human-like relationship. Given the impact of trust observed in human-robot interaction (HRI), appropriate trust in robotic collaborators is one of the leading factors influencing the performance of human-robot interaction. Team performance can be diminished if people do not trust robots appropriately by disusing or misusing them based on limited experience. Therefore, trust in HRI needs to be calibrated properly, rather than maximized, to let the formation of an appropriate level of trust in human collaborators. For trust calibration in HRI, trust needs to be modeled first. There are many reviews on factors affecting trust in HRI, however, as there are no reviews concentrated on different trust models, in this paper, we review different techniques and methods for trust modeling in HRI. We also present a list of potential directions for further research and some challenges that need to be addressed in future work on human-robot trust modeling.