Effects of Interfaces on Human-Robot Trust: Specifying and Visualizing Physical Zones
This work addresses trust issues in human-robot interaction for shared physical spaces, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interface and feedback research.
The study investigated how different interfaces and feedback mechanisms affect human trust in robots when specifying no-go zones, finding that interfaces and feedback influence trust levels and participants preferred mixed modality pairs.
In this paper we investigate the influence interfaces and feedback have on human-robot trust levels when operating in a shared physical space. The task we use is specifying a "no-go" region for a robot in an indoor environment. We evaluate three styles of interface (physical, AR, and map-based) and four feedback mechanisms (no feedback, robot drives around the space, an AR "fence", and the region marked on the map). Our evaluation looks at both usability and trust. Specifically, if the participant trusts that the robot "knows" where the no-go region is and their confidence in the robot's ability to avoid that region. We use both self-reported and indirect measures of trust and usability. Our key findings are: 1) interfaces and feedback do influence levels of trust; 2) the participants largely preferred a mixed interface-feedback pair, where the modality for the interface differed from the feedback.