Investigating the Effects of Social Interactive Behaviours of a Robot on People’s Trust During a Navigation Task

• Published in: Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems pp. 349 - 361
• Main Authors: Rossi, Alessandra, Garcia, Fernando, Maya, Arturo Cruz, Dautenhahn, Kerstin, Koay, Kheng Lee, Walters, Michael L., Pandey, Amit K.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2019
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Human-robot interaction; Robot companion; Robot social navigation; Social robotics; Trust in robots
• ISBN: 9783030238063; 3030238067
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-23807-0_29

Identifying the roles and the specific social behaviours that evoke human trust towards robots is key for user acceptance. Specially, while performing tasks in the real world, such as navigation or guidance, the predictability of robot motion and predictions of user intentions facilitate interaction. We present a user study in which a humanoid-robot guided participants around a human populated environment, avoiding collisions while following a socially acceptable trajectory. We investigated which behaviours performed by a humanoid robot during a guidance task exhibited better social acceptance by people, and how robot behaviours influence their trust in a robot to safely complete a guiding task. We concluded that in general, people prefer and trust a robot that exhibits social behaviours such as talking and maintaining an appropriate safe distance from obstacles.