On Trust-aware Assistance-seeking in Human-Supervised Autonomy

Abstract

Using the context of human-supervised object collection tasks, we explore policies for a robot to seek assistance from a human supervisor and avoid loss of human trust in the robot. We consider a human-robot interaction scenario in which a mobile manipulator chooses to collect objects either autonomously or through human assistance; while the human supervisor monitors the robot’s operation, assists when asked, or intervenes if the human perceives that the robot may not accomplish its goal. We design an optimal assistance-seeking policy for the robot using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) setting in which human trust is a hidden state and the objective is to maximize collaborative performance. We conduct two sets of human-robot interaction experiments. The data from the first set of experiments is used to estimate POMDP parameters, which are used to compute an optimal assistance-seeking policy that is used in the second experiment. For most participants, the estimated POMDP reveals that humans are more likely to intervene when their trust is low and the robot is performing a high-complexity task; and that robot asking for assistance in high-complexity tasks can increase human trust in the robot. Our experimental results show that the proposed trust-aware policy yields superior performance compared with an optimal trust-agnostic policy.