Common (good) practices measuring trust in HRI

Abstract

Trust in robots is widely believed to be imperative for the adoption of robots into people's daily lives. It is, therefore, understandable that the literature of the last few decades focuses on measuring how much people trust robots -- and more generally, any agent - to foster such trust in these technologies. Researchers have been exploring how people trust robot in different ways, such as measuring trust on human-robot interactions (HRI) based on textual descriptions or images without any physical contact, during and after interacting with the technology. Nevertheless, trust is a complex behaviour, and it is affected and depends on several factors, including those related to the interacting agents (e.g. humans, robots, pets), itself (e.g. capabilities, reliability), the context (e.g. task), and the environment (e.g. public spaces vs private spaces vs working spaces). In general, most roboticists agree that insufficient levels of trust lead to a risk of disengagement while over-trust in technology can cause over-reliance and inherit dangers, for example, in emergency situations. It is, therefore, very important that the research community has access to reliable methods to measure people's trust in robots and technology. In this position paper, we outline current methods and their strengths, identify (some) weakly covered aspects and discuss the potential for covering a more comprehensive amount of factors influencing trust in HRI.