Evaluating Trust and Safety in HRI : Practical Issues and Ethical Challenges

Abstract

In an effort to increase the acceptance and persuasiveness of socially assistive robots in home and healthcare envi-ronments, HRI researchers attempt to identify factors that promote human trust and perceived safety with regard to robots. Especially in collaborative contexts in which hu-mans are requested to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role, as it is strongly linked to persuasiveness. As a result, human-robot trust can directly affect people’s willingness to coop-erate with the robot, while under- or overreliance could have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, in-vestigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments is not a straightforward task and, in light of a number of ethical concerns and risks, proves quite challeng-ing. This position statement highlights a few of these points based on experiences from HRI practice and raises a few important questions that HRI researchers should consider.