“We wanted to ask the question about whether people would be willing to trust these rescue robots,” said Wagner. “A more important question now might be to ask how to prevent them from trusting these robots too much.”
Beyond emergency situations, there are other issues of trust in human-robot relationships, said Robinette.
“Would people trust a hamburger-making robot to provide them with food?” he asked. “If a robot carried a sign saying it was a ‘child-care robot,’ would people leave their babies with it? Will people put their children into an autonomous vehicle and trust it to take them to grandma’s house? We don’t know why people trust or don’t trust machines.”
In addition to those already mentioned, the research included Wenchen Li and Robert Allen, graduate research assistants in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.
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