These findings could improve the success of real-world human-robot teams, helping users like the emergency services to work more effectively with robots in the future. 

By sensing co-movement in real-world environments, robots could use this as an indicator to sense whether the user trusts them sufficiently. The team predicted that if robots can move alongside humans in a synchronised way it would build trust – and conversely, that if a user distrusts a robot, the co-movement will be disrupted.

The team then tracked the human and robot movement using an ultrasound tracking system. They found statistical evidence that synchronisation between human and robot movement over time, when the robot was within two metres, is related to changes in self-reported trust. Users who reported lower trust in the robots were found to have mirrored the robots’ movements less.

This means movement could potentially be used by the robots as a marker for problems with their user’s trust in them, and they could take pre-emptive actions to try and improve or repair the trust, for instance if they have made a mistake and they need to make amends.

Read the full University of Bristol news item

‘Co-Movement and Trust Development in Human-Robot Teams’ by Nicola Webb, Edmund Hunt et al. was recently presented at the 16th International Conference on Social Robotics +AI in Odense, Denmark, where it was nominated for best paper award.