Helen Hastie

It's just an example of why human robot trust is really important.

So we looked at the relationship between humans and trust.

And we investigated whether certain aspects of human human interaction can map over to human robot trust.

Most definitely.

And also with these large language models, what they are good at is failing gracefully.

So rather than computer says no, they are able to respond in an appropriate manner.

Right.

So the Robotarium looks at translating research into real world applications.

And to do that, you really have to have a testing environment.

So there's part for autonomous robotics, large hangar for flying drones, testing autonomous vehicles.

And then there's a living lab, which is essentially a flat that's censored up where we can put robots and invite people to come and interact with them in a kind of more natural, comfortable setting.

So what we wanted to do is put a robot in the wild.

So this is where the field is really trying to push forward, moving away from very controlled settings to just leaving the robot and seeing how people get on with it.

So we installed a robot in our common room at the university.

We attached it to a very good Italian coffee machine so that people would be motivated to interact and work with it.

And what we were looking to investigate was whether people's attitudes to robots would change over time.

It's essentially a head and it has a back propagated light with a face that can have various facial expressions and has a computer voice.

Well, no, it was attached to a coffee machine, but it would take your order, it would chat to you.

But these robots are really good at trying to understand social cues and how people react to robots' social cues because it does have quite an expressive facial expression.

So each customer had a loyalty card, so that was a way that we could keep track of them.