An Immersive Investment Game to Study Human-Robot Trust

Abstract

As robots become more advanced and capable, developing trust is an important factor of human-robot interaction and cooperation. However, as multiple environmental and social factors can influence trust, it is important to develop more elaborate scenarios and methods to measure human-robot trust. A widely used measurement of trust in social science is the investment game. In this study, we propose a scaled-up, immersive, science fiction Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenario for intrinsic motivation on human-robot collaboration, built upon the investment game and aimed at adapting the investment game for human-robot trust. For this purpose, we utilize two Neuro-Inspired COmpanion (NICO) - robots and a projected scenery. We investigate the applicability of our space mission experiment design to measure trust and the impact of non-verbal communication. We observe a correlation of 0.43 ((Formula presented.)) between self-assessed trust and trust measured from the game, and a positive impact of non-verbal communication on trust ((Formula presented.)) and robot perception for anthropomorphism ((Formula presented.)) and animacy ((Formula presented.)). We conclude that our scenario is an appropriate method to measure trust in human-robot interaction and also to study how non-verbal communication influences a human’s trust in robots.