Human-Robot Team: Effects of Communication in Analyzing Trust

Trust is related to the performance of human teams, making it a significant characteristic, which needs to be analyzed inside human-robot teams. Trust was researched for a long time in other domains like social sciences, psychology, and economics. Building trust within a team is formed through common tasks and it depends on team performance and communication. By applying an online game based tasks for human-robot teams, the effects of three communication conditions (communication without text and verbal interaction, communication with text and verbal interaction related/not related to the task) on trust are analyzed. Additionally, we found that the participants’ background is linked to the trust in the interaction with the robot. The results show that in a human-robot team the human trust will increase more over time when he/she is working with a robot that uses text and verbal interaction communication related to the task. They further suggest that human trust will decrease to a lower extent when the robot fails in doing the tasks if it uses text and verbal communication with the human.