As robots enter everyday life, it is important to understand how and why people trust them. Too much trust leads to over-reliance and the expectation that a system performs flawlessly. Too little trust causes people to under-utilize robots, reducing the effectiveness of a deployed system. This talk will discuss strategies and pitfalls when deploying household, aerial, and marine robots expected to work with humans.
Paul Robinette is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). He has performed extensive experiments on human-robot trust in time-critical situations in virtual simulations, the lab, and the field. In recent years, he focused on field robotics: in-situ human-robot teaming experiments in the marine domain and field experiments for river navigation of autonomous surface vehicles. These projects have yielded datasets that have been released for the human-robot interaction community and the marine robotics community.