What does it take to trust a robot you have not seen before?

Take part in a pilot experiment and experience a robot interacting with you in simulated scenarios. Your participation will contribute to ongoing research. You will also experience human-robot-interaction in an immersive virtual-reality environment,  learn about Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and learn more about research findings so far and plans for the future.

This event is in-person. Registration is not required.

This demonstration is lead by the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub project, Leap of Faith. Sachini Weerawardhana, Peta Masters, Ioana Sandu and Yang Lu, members of the Leap of Faith project team, will be present during the demos to discuss the experiment and the research.

The project explores instantaneous trust between humans and social robots by taking a human-centered approach. Instantaneous trust occurs in situations characterized by the absence of an interaction history between the human and a robot. By simulating situations such as robot-assisted emergency evacuations and robot assistants in office, we examine the impact of two factors: (1) behavioural aspects of the robot, specifically movement, tone of voice, and embodiment that cause the human to believe that he/she can relate to the robot, and (2) informational aspects about the robot delivered verbally or visually, that reassure the human that the instruction they are being given is reliable and that it has emanated from a reliable source. Our research is intended to broaden the understanding of the variables that can be manipulated to engender instantaneous trust in an robot leading to voluntary compliance of instructions that it delivers, when the robot is co-located with a human in a potentially unknown and/or dangerous environment, thus taking a step towards building autonomous systems that are trusted by design.

This event is part of the King's Festival of Artificial Intelligence, running from Wednesday 24 to Sunday 28 May 2023, which brings together speakers, exhibits, demos and screenings in an exciting programme of events. Take a look at the other events here.

This demo will also happen on Wednesday 7 June.