Trustworthy Human-Robot Teams

COVID19  has presented novel challenges for routine tasks such as surgery and cleaning. Social distancing makes working in close proximity difficult, exacerbated by additional pressures due to employee sickness and austerity measures.

These challenges present increased opportunities for human-robot collaborative teams but questions remain relating to trust towards the robot within the team and more broadly, the trust of affected groups (e.g., patients) towards tasks carried out by robot-assisted teams.

Trustworthy Human-Robot Teams is an interdisciplinary project which will address different aspects related to trust within and towards human-robot teams in surgery and cleaning.

Project Objectives:

• Understand how trust is accomplished moment-by-moment within human-robot teams by drawing on analysis of deployments in situ (understand the current situation better);
• Develop approaches to reassure affected groups via appropriate communication channels (e.g., data visualisation) (develop new approaches);
• Validate the practicality and trust issues around novel/proposed human-robot teams by prototype studies and quasi-naturalistic experiments (trial/study new approaches);
• Verify the effectiveness of the human-robot teams, e.g., by measuring and metricating the disinfection performance (analyse/evaluate new approaches).

This project is funded by the EPSRC TAS Hub (Agile research programme) and led by Dr Nik Watson, University of Nottingham.

Paper output: “They’re not going to do all the tasks we do”: Understanding Trust and Reassurance towards a UV-C Disinfection Robot