The collaborative mind: intention reading and trust in human-robot interaction.

Robots are likely to become important social actors in our future and so require more human-like ways of assisting us. We state that collaboration between humans and robots is fostered by two cognitive skills: intention reading and trust. An agent possessing these abilities would be able to infer the non-verbal intentions of others and to evaluate how likely they are to achieve their goals, jointly understanding what kind and which degree of collaboration they require.

Would a robot trust you? Developmental robotics model of trust and theory of mind.

Trust is a critical issue in human-robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals.