Collaborative Research: The role of trust when learning from robots

十年前，机器人通常扮演“工具”或“队友”的角色。今天，虽然有一些明确的情况下，“工具”或“队友”模型是适当的，大多数长期部署在家庭，工作场所或学校的协作机器人很容易在代理“队友”和无生命的“工具”之间来回切换。虽然人们容忍这种感知代理的转变，但尚不清楚这种转变如何影响通常只归因于代理“队友”机器人的人际属性。该项目将评估影响人们如何信任机器人的因素，认识到人类“信任”非代理自动化的方式与我们“信任”代理和代理机器人的方式根本不同。当机器人变成一个无生命的工具时，当它成为一个代理人时所形成的信任会发生什么？当无生命的工具回到作为一个代理队友会发生什么？这项拟议中的研究将填补我们对年轻人如何发展对机器人的信任的理解方面的一个重大空白。虽然对非代理机器人的信任已经得到了很好的理解，但对作为协作工具的机器人的信任却很少有系统的研究。这项工作具有广泛的应用，未来部署的机器人系统，随着时间的推移之间的代理（类人）和非代理（类对象）的行为。研究人员将专注于机构在一个重要的应用领域：儿童学习中建立人机交互信任的作用。专门为儿童设计的教育机器人越来越普遍，经常取代人类的社交信息渠道。然而，没有信任，这些机器人就无法成功;因为儿童天生是社会和协作学习者，信任是成功学习的先决条件。将互动机器人设计的见解与学龄前和学龄前儿童的实验相结合，该项目将确定感知代理的变化如何影响信任的形成，维护和修复：研究1调查了单一交互中低级别感知线索的变化如何影响信任和随后的学习。研究2探讨了高层次社会线索的变化如何导致差异信任和后续学习。在这些实验中，设计了一套适合年龄的协作学习游戏。研究人员还为儿童行为创建了一个编码方案，并进行了互动后的儿童访谈，以评估儿童对机器人的看法，并衡量学习的有效性。该项目的发现和活动可能在多个领域产生广泛影响，包括：（1）设计将影响广泛应用领域的指南，包括医疗保健，制造业和教育;（2）增强/扩大学习，教育和培训，包括研究生和本科生研究人员的研究产品;（3）扩大在计算的一个领域的参与，以及（4）该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响进行评估来支持审查标准。

A decade ago, robots typically played the role of “tool” or “teammate”. Today, although there are some clear cases where the “tool” or “teammate” model is appropriate, most collaborative robots in long-term deployments in homes, workplaces, or schools readily switch back and forth between being an agentic “teammate” to an inanimate “tool”. While people tolerate this shift in perceived agency, it is unknown how this shift impacts interpersonal properties that are typically attributed only to agentic “teammate” robots. This project will evaluate factors that affect how people trust robots, recognizing that the way humans “trust” non-agentic automation is fundamentally different from the way that we “trust” agents and agentic robots. What happens to the trust formed while a robot is an agent when it becomes an inanimate tool? What happens when the inanimate tool returns to being an agentic teammate? The proposed research will fill a significant gap in our understanding of how young humans develop trust in robots. While trust in non-agentic robots is well understood, there has been little systematic study of trust in robots that function as collaborative tools. This work has broad applications to future deployment of robots as systems that vary over time between agentic (human-like) and non-agentic (object-like) behavior. The investigators will concentrate on the role of agency in establishing trust in human-robot interactions in an important application domain: children’s learning. Educational robots designed specifically for children are increasingly common, often replacing human channels of social information. However, these robots cannot be successful without trust; because children are inherently social and collaborative learners, trust is a prerequisite for successful learning. Integrating insights from interactive robot design into experiments with preschool and early school age children, the project will determine how shifts in perceived agency impact the formation, maintenance, and repair of trust: Study 1 investigates how variations of low-level perceptual cues over a single interaction influence trust and subsequent learning. Study 2 examines how variations of high-level social cues lead to differential trust and subsequent learning. For these experiments, a set of age-appropriate collaborative learning games were designed. The investigators also created a coding scheme for child behavior as well as a post-interaction child interview to assess children’s perceptions of the robots and to measure effectiveness of learning. Findings and activities of this project could have broad impacts in multiple arenas including: (1) design guidelines that will influence a broad range of application areas including healthcare, manufacturing, and education; (2) enhancement/augmentation of learning, education and training, including research offerings for graduate and undergraduate investigators; (3) broadening of participation in one area of computing, and (4) dissemination of science to the general public and to the research community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.