Trust in Robots: Challenges and Opportunities

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: To assess the state-of-the-art in research on trust in robots and to examine if recent methodological advances can aid in the development of trustworthy robots. RECENT FINDINGS: While traditional work in trustworthy robotics has focused on studying the antecedents and consequences of trust in robots, recent work has gravitated towards the development of strategies for robots to actively gain, calibrate, and maintain the human user’s trust. Among these works, there is emphasis on endowing robotic agents with reasoning capabilities (e.g., via probabilistic modeling). SUMMARY: The state-of-the-art in trust research provides roboticists with a large trove of tools to develop trustworthy robots. However, challenges remain when it comes to trust in real-world human-robot interaction (HRI) settings: there exist outstanding issues in trust measurement, guarantees on robot behavior (e.g., with respect to user privacy), and handling rich multidimensional data. We examine how recent advances in psychometrics, trustworthy systems, robot-ethics, and deep learning can provide resolution to each of these issues. In conclusion, we are of the opinion that these methodological advances could pave the way for the creation of truly autonomous, trustworthy social robots.